Where to Find Good Stock Photos For Your Website

Joe Freelancer
Tools for Entrepreneurs
7 min readMar 23, 2017

Images play a pivotal role while creating an impressive online content. They are essential to give an attractive look to your website and maintain a certain level of interest for the reader. Moreover, they are also important as far as reading perspective is concerned. Images help to break up long articles and allow the readers to digest the information.

As part of this, finding a suitable image for your website is a fundamental step. An image is the first thing visitors notice as soon as they land on the page. It is a decisive factor as to how a visitor perceives about a particular website. Readers are instantly attracted by a nice and pretty image.

However, one thing creates a situation of uncertainty for most website owners and that is where to find a perfect image or whether a particular image is safe to use or not. It is a matter of great concern, as no one wants to receive a legal notice from the legitimate owner of an image. Using a free image is always a risky move. They are free to download and use, yet the quality is relatively low and the choice is limited as well.

Here are the best sources to download stock photos for your website. Click To Tweet

On the contrary, choosing a paid image is a wise choice, since it is the legitimate way to get high-quality images. In addition, paid stock image websites allow you to access a wide range of superior quality stock photos. Buying the right stock image is beneficial for your business in many ways. Each stock image has its standard license that lets you edit and retouch photos without much resistance.

A stock image saves your time and money while creating a perfect looking website. Listed below are few sources to get high-quality images for your creative projects.

123RF

123rf-logo

123RF is a well-established agency, with a huge library of stock images. You can get images of your choice at an affordable price. This company is run by a stock photography agency “Inmagine”, which possesses more than 10 years of experience. It offers Royalty Free and cheap stock images with multiple buying options. With its flexible licensing terms, you can easily buy a suitable image without compromising quality.

In addition to its library of 65 Million vectors and stock photos, 123RF has expanded its business by adding stock footage and stock audio. Smartphone users can also access the library and create lightboxes through their mobile app. This website offers numerous tech tools like free online photo editor and a reverse image search.

PhotoDune

photodune

PhotoDune is a one-stop shop to buy budget friendly and engaging images. Although their collection is less comprehensive as compared to other competitors, they offer a considerable collection of images in each category. The best part of the deal is their pricing structure, starting from standard $1 for all extra small images. However, you have to pay $1 extra for images of larger size.

Some other worth mentioning features of PhotoDune are as under.

  • The largest size images are available for under $9
  • Your previous purchases are stored, which makes it easy to download them again
  • You can buy these images using a credit card or through any other form of payment

Crestock

crestock

This visual content provider offers superior quality and royalty-free stock images that are available at an affordable price. Founded in 2005, Crestock is one of the top growing companies which deals in royalty-free stock images. It is an ideal option for low budget clients to find numerous creative and cheap images.

In addition, the fast and reliable image upload system of Crestock allows photographers and illustrators a licensing platform for their creative work. With clients in more than 100 countries, Crestock is a global entity. It offers over 2.5 million royalty-free images and its user-friendly interface makes it easy to find and download your required images.

Depositphotos

Istockphoto

Depositphotos owns a huge collection of more than 60 million high-definition footage and best-quality stock photographs. They offer this amazing stuff at a reasonable price to suit your needs. This particular company is a growing and cheap stock photo agency, which is moving at a rapid pace to gain its market share.

Depositphotos keeps increasing their inventory by attracting new contributors. Lower prices and buyer bonuses are some of their plus points. It offers inexpensive credits and subscriptions plans. New members can also enjoy a free 7-day subscription plan. It has an efficient search engine, based on categories, photographer, color, orientation, keywords and size.

Istockphoto

istock-logo

IStockphoto is a venture of Getty Images and is now serving under new name “iStock”. This specific stock photo agency is among the oldest and largest players in this industry. They sell visual content through subscription plans and credits.

If you need a unique photo for your project, this is the right place to get high-end stock images. Their inventory is in the millions and regular images are quite affordable, irrespective of their great quality. Find your desired photograph from the vast collection of premium quality images in a hassle-free manner.

iStock has a fantastic keyword-driven search engine which completes the task within a split of a second. They offer two purchase plans, buy either using credits or through a Subscription. Similarly, images are also divided into two categories, naming Subscription collections and Essential.

The Essential collection consists of millions of regular images, while the Signature collection contains over 8 million hand-picked illustrations, images, and video collected through their professional contributors.

Getty Images

getty_images

Getty Images is a leading company which creates and distributes award-winning still photographs, videos, and multimedia products. They also offer their services through their trusted brands, including Thinkstock©and iStock©. With its amazing image recognition and advanced search technology, Getty Images is providing its services in more than 100 countries.

Their team of professional photographers produces inspiring photographs, which not only serve the purpose for websites but also appear in most famous newspapers and magazines. Their inventory holds more than 24 million high-quality paid images. Although they are more expensive, there are numerous other reasons to buy images from Getty Images.

Shutterstock

shutterstock-logo

Shutterstock owns the most comprehensive collections of more than 28 million superior quality photos and vector images. They sell through either monthly subscriptions or package deals. You can enjoy the freedom of downloading unlimited images during the subscription period. However, some premium quality images are available at relatively higher prices. This sounds like an expensive deal, but their collection of exclusive images serves as a perfect compensation for the price.

Bigstock Photo

big-stock

Bigstock Photo has a large library, comprising of over 15 million unique images. Their collection includes fantastic photos, portraits, fashion photographs, vector images, and landscapes. Although their collection is not as exhaustive as offered by other big players of the industry, it is a reasonable source of images to serve the purpose. Moreover, its affordable price structure and user-friendly interface makes it an ideal option for buying a perfect image for your project.

Fotolia

Fotolia

Fotolia is a community of graphic designers and photographers, providing valuable visual content for the clients. Their library is crowded with amazing illustrations, royalty-free images, vectors, and video clips. Fotolia offers its services around the globe through their websites in 15 languages. You can also use their app to search and download images using the smartphone.
Some of their highlighted features are as under.

  • Search among 28 million high-resolution, royalty-free photos
  • Organize your own personalized Galleries by downloading directly to your Dropbox Create and Camera Roll
  • Limit your search by size, type, and price

Conclusion

To conclude, it may be stated that utilizing the above mentioned resources to find a stock image would surely be a wise decision. These royalty-free stock image websites are a blessing for bloggers, marketers, and designers. So, from now on, you need not settle for cheap or free stock photo resources anymore.

Originally published at Freelancer Bundle.

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