Good, high-quality images add visual interest to your website. Another reason why photos have become so important is because web pages that include good photos get better engagement when shared on social sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Can you make a small image have a higher resolution? If you are using the image for your website, you don't need anything above 72 dpi, but you will still. When you hover over or click on an image, you will see 'High Resolution' and 'Low Resolution' download options. 'Low Res' images are great for small web graphics, where file sizes need to be very compressed. 'High Res' images are better for presentations, websites, online stores, and anywhere else where quality matters most.
Download High Quality Images for Free
The web offers billions of photos that are just a Google search away. The images that are in public domain, or licensed under the Creative Commons license, can be used without any copyright issues.
The only problem is that Google may not always surface the best content that is free. Their algorithms, at least for image search, prefer pages from premium stock photography websites and the free listings thus lose out. If Google isn’t helping in your quest for images, here are some of the best websites where you may find high-quality photos for free.
1.unsplash.com (Unsplash) – This is my favorite website for downloading high-resolution photographs. Subscribe to the email newsletter and you’ll get 10 photos in your inbox every 10 days. All images are under the CC0 license meaning they are in public domain and you are free to use them in any way you like.
2.google.com (LIFE) – The Google images website hosts millions of historical photographs from the LIFE library. You can add source:life to any query in Google image search to find these images and they are free for personal, non-commercial use.
3.flickr.com (The British Library) – The national library of the UK has uploaded over a million vintage photographs and scanned images to Flickr that are now in pubic domain and they encourage re-use.
4.picjubmo.com (Picjumbo) – Here you’ll find exceptionally high-quality photos for your personal and commercial use. The pictures have been shot by the site owner himself and all he requests for in return is proper attribution.
5.pixabay.com (Pixabay) – All the images on Pixabay are available under the CC0 license and thus can be used anywhere. Like Flickr, there’s an option to browse photographs by camera model as well.
6.publicdomainarchive.com (Public Domain Archive) – This is an impressive online repository of public domain images that are neatly organized in categories. It contains only high quality photos though the collection is limited at this time.
7.commons.wikimedia.org (Wikimedia Commons) – The site hosts 21+ million images under some kind of free license or in the public domain. The images are arranged in categories or you can find images through search keywords.
8.superfamous.com (Super Famous) – Another great resource for finding high-res images for your websites and other design projects. The images are licensed under Creative Commons and require attribution.
9.nos.twnsnd.co (New Old Stock) – Here you will find a curated collection of vintage photographs from public archives that are free of any copyright restrictions. If you are trying to create a twitter feed like @HistoricalPics, this might be a good source for images.
10.freeimages.com (Stock Exchange) – This is one of the biggest repositories of free images and graphics that you can use for almost any purpose. You do however need to sign-in to download the images. The site, previously hosted on the schx.hu domain, is now part of Getty Images.
11.raumrot.com (Raumrot) – The site features beautiful, hi-res 300DPI stock photographs available for both personal and commercial use. The pictures are sorted by subject and available under Creative Commons.
Related: Protect your photos from Casual Copying
12.gettyimages.com (Getty Images) – If you are looking for professional images for your website but without the expensive license fee, Getty has something in store for you. You can embed pictures from Getty Images for free on your website though in future, the embeds may carry ads.
13.pdpics.com (Public Domain Photos) – The website contains thousands of royalty free images that can be used in both personal and commercial projects but with attribution. Unlike other sites that merely curate content, the images found here have been clicked by their in-house photographers.
14.imcreator.com (IM Free) – A curated collection of outstanding high-quality photos on all subjects that are also free for commercial use. The images have mostly been sourced from Flickr and require attribution.
15.photopin.com (Photo Pin) – Flickr is among the biggest repository of photographs on the web and Photo Pin helps you easily find photos on Flickr that are available under the Creative Commons license. You get the embed code as well so you don’t have to host the images on your own server.
16.kaboompics.com (Kaboom Pics) – Karolina Grabowska, a web designer from Poland, has uploaded 550+ high-resolution photos (240-300dpi ) that you can use for all kind of projects included commercial ones. The photos are arranged in categories and tags or you can use the search box to quickly find images on various subjects.
17.morguefile.com (Morgue File) – The site hosts 300,000+ free images and you are free to use them in both personal and commercial projects even without attribution. The image gallery has a built-in cropping tool and you can even hotlink the images from your website.
18.magdeleine.co (Magdeleine) – Hand-picked and free stock photos that you can search by subject, mood or even the dominant color. Some of the images are copyright free and you can do whatever you like with those photos.
Tip: How to avoid common photos
You may have found a great photo that is perfect for your project but there’s a probability that several other websites are using the same image. It will therefore help if you do a reverse image search using Google Images to estimate the relative popularity of that image on the Internet.
Also see: Sell your Instagram & Facebook Photos
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Updated: November 9, 2019 Home » The Web » Web Tools, Services, and Resources
If you’re searching for photos free for professional commercial and personal use, here are 10 sites that offers thousands of free stock photos. Many of these royalty free high resolution photographs are free from copyright restrictions or licensed under creative commons public domain dedication.
Alternative 2020 Article ➤ 5 Free Jpeg Compression Tools With Lossy And Lossless Optimization
However, the best and biggest royalty free image search engine that filters out high resolution is none other than Google. You can filter the results for ‘Labeled for resue‘ as shown with the image below.
↓ 01 – Pexels | Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license
By providing free stock photos Pexels helps millions of creators all over the world to easily create beautiful products and designs. Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable and also easy to discover through our discover pages.
Currently they cover over 25,000 free stock photos. And every month at least 3,000 new high resolution photos will be added. All photos are hand-picked from photos uploaded by their users or sourced from free image websites. They will make sure all published pictures are high-quality and licensed under CC0.
↓ 02 – Pixabay | Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license
Free images and videos you can use anywhere. All images and videos on Pixabay are released free of copyrights under Creative Commons CC0. You may download, modify, distribute, and use them royalty free for anything you like, even in commercial applications. Attribution is not required.
↓ 03 – StockSnap | Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license
StockSnap is the best place on the internet to find beautiful free stock photos. They select nothing but the highest quality, highest resolution pictures and add them to our database on a daily basis. This is not your typical crappy stock photo site.
![High resolution coloring book images High resolution coloring book images](/uploads/1/2/4/9/124961322/163703070.jpg)
All photos uploaded to the site are released under Creative Commons – CC0 and do not require attribution. No more hassle trying to figure out whether you can use photos for commercial use and whether you need to provide attribution. They curate the best stock photos from around the web and we also upload photos from select photographers within our network. The end result is a bad ass repository of beautiful stock photography.
↓ 04 – Unsplash | Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license
Free do whatever you want high-resolution photos. The Unsplash license uses the Creative Commons Zero license, which doesn’t require credit to be given. However, we encourage giving credit to the photographer if possible, since they generously donated their photographs for use by the public.
↓ 05 – FreeImages | Free For Commercial / Personal With Attribution
Free images is a high quality resource of digital stock photography for use by all. All images in our collection are free to use on websites, printed materials and anywhere you need photos for illustration and design use. There are more than 5000 images on www.freeimages.co.uk, a collection of more than 13,000 images on freeimageslive.co.uk plus an extra 1000 images exclusively for their site members.
↓ 06 – picjumbo | Free But Photo Redistribution Disallowed
picjumbo is free stock photo site created by designer & photographer Viktor Hanacek in 2013. It all started when any regular stock photo site didn‘t want his photos due to lack of quality. Two years later people downloaded more than two and half millions images from this site.
↓ 07 – Morguefile | Royalty Free – Commercial Use Allowed
Morguefile is a free photo archive “for creatives, by creatives.” Founded by Michael Connors in the early Internet days of 1996, the site was created to serve as a free image exchange for creative professionals and teachers to use in their work.
This same mission remains true today: we are a community-based free photo site, and all photos found in the Morguefile archive are free for you to download and re-use in your work, be it commercial or not. The photos have been contributed by a wide range of creatives from around the world, ranging from amateur photo hobbyists to professionals.
↓ 08 – Freeimages | License Varies
Freeimages was launched in February 2001 as an alternative for expensive stock photography. The idea was to create a site where creative people could exchange their photos for inspiration or work. The site has evolved into the massive community you see today — there are over 2,500,000 registered users and around 400,000 photos online.
↓ 09 – StockPhotosforFree | Free For Personal & Non-commercial
Are you searching for the perfect image for your website, blog post, advertisement, or media project, but don’t want to spend a dime? StockPhotosforFree.com has you covered,providing a selection of over 100,000 completely free stock photos that you can use in all types of projects (even commercial!), and there are never any fees.
↓ 10 – StockVault | Free For Personal & Non-commercial
Stockvault is where photographers, designers and students can share their photographs, graphics and vector files with each other for free. Their sole purpose is to collect and archive high resolution photographs that photographers, designers and students can share and use for their personal and non-commercial design projects.
↓ 11 – Rawpixel | Free For Personal & Commercial
Rawpixel is the world leading creator of stock images, but they need one more thing: YOU. Their team of artists want to connect with you to share ideas,
collaborate, and inspire each other to drive our craft forward.
collaborate, and inspire each other to drive our craft forward.