Are you looking for high-quality royalty-free photos for your next project? Photos, illustrations, and graphics are an important part of any website because they help bring the text to life and keep readers browsing your pages. However, if you’re not a photographer, finding images online that you can use for your website can be a slightly tricky task.
This post may contain affiliate links, meaning if you decide to purchase via my links, I may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. Please read my disclaimer for more info.
Top 3 best free stock photo sites in 2025
Nobody wants to use the same boring, corporate stock photo every other website uses. This article is to help you find beautiful, free images and photos that you can download and use for any project.
Food picture from Pexels.com
How to find free stock images for personal, business and commercial use
While it seems like the easiest option to be sourcing a photo on Google Images and saving it to your computer, I can tell you, this is a bad idea! The problem with downloading your desired images from Google is that most of these photos are still owned by whoever created the photo and that person will hold the copyright, and that can get you in trouble.
Any image is protected by copyright as soon as it is created. This means that using all or part of an image when you don’t have permission to do so is a violation of copyright. It could land you with a significant fine. Infringing copyright can lead to a fine of more than $5,000! If you’re not sure about whether you have the right to use an image in a particular way, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Free stock photos, royalty free images & videos
In this article, we’ll explore the better places you can go to find images you can use for your websites. There are a few stock photo sites out there that offer a wide variety of unique (and free) images for your website, blog, social media, or any other creative projects.
As a blogger and a business owner, I’ve done my fair share of scouring the web for the perfect stock photos and videos. So there I was, spending several weeks reviewing dozens of stock photo websites. Now I’ve narrowed it down and come to these three BEST websites for free stock photos.
How to find the best websites with 100% free stock photos
The best free stock image sites must contain images that can be used without payment for both commercial and personal purposes. I focused on sites that have at least thousands of photos, but I favored ones that offer images in the hundreds of thousands or more.
A lot of free stock photo sites essentially offer the same pictures. I looked for sites that offered unique images so your content can stand out.
If you plan to use stock photos for your website or branded content, you’ll need high-quality resolutions. Every site on this list offers at least one high-quality download size for its photos. And of course, the website itself should be fast, easy to navigate, and easy to download.
Important things to know about copyright
You can’t just search the web for an image you like and publish it. Photos and images are automatically protected by copyright.Â
Copyright is a legal right granted to the creators of original works of authorship. Because creators own the rights to their images, and if you publish one of them without their approval, you may be guilty of copyright infringement.
You could end up with a huge fine!Â
Best free stock photo sites
There are many websites with free stock photos and videos for your new business, but these are my top 3!
- Unsplash Let’s start with Unsplash. This site has the widest variety of free stock images, with over 6 million free photos! A lot of native apps and integrations are a standout feature.
- Pixabay Pixabay on the other hand has professional looking illustrations for a variety of media types. On Pixabay are over 5 million free photos to choose from for your website.
- Pexels Also in my top 3: Pexels. This site is best for adding simple enhancements and overlays. There are more than 1 million free photos, and it has an easy integration with Canva.
Free stock photos for commercial use
Finding images that are free for commercial use isn’t as hard as it might sound. Most sites usually let you search and filter by keyword or category, making it easy to find what you’re looking for. Rawpixel is for a variety of creative resources, with detailed search options.
Explore our inspirational collection of 3 million+ professionally made free creative assets, editable templates, mockups, and designs.Â
Burst is for e-commerce companies. Powered by Shopify, so very business-friendly. Free stock photos and royalty-free images. Download stunning photos for websites and commercial use. Another great website is 123RF is for a mix of AI-generated and stock photos.
There are 220+ million royalty-free images, vectors, and illustrations to fuel your creativity, BUT only free for the first 7 days!! After that, it’s a paid plan. You can always try it out for 7 days; the images are amazing! You can filter out AI-generated images here, too.Â
It’s important to know you can never re-sell or re-distribute any of this free content!Â
Free AI stock images icons, illustrations and 3D
There are two websites where I go for illustrations and icons. The AI images are beautiful! FreeImages.com offers a variety of free photos, clipart, vectors, PSD, & Icons. here you’ll get free pictures, templates, mockups, and graphic resources.
And on Lummi.ai you can find free AI Stock Images, Illustrations & 3D. No more boring stock! The best free stock photos and royalty-free images. Powered by robots everywhere. It’s amazing what you can find there and download right away.
AI-generated images vs. stock photos
AI is revolutionizing most online spaces, and stock photos are no exception. With the advent of generative AI, it’s possible to feed your exact specifications into an AI image generator like Midjourney and get a unique, often sophisticated, result.
The ability to generate fresh new photos that match your exact needs might mean stock photos will soon become a thing of the past.
But AI image generation isn’t perfect, at least not yet. Not everyone has the time to learn how to create prompts to get the results they want—and even then, AI-generated photos aren’t consistent in quality or relevance.
And then there are ethical and copyright-related issues that are still up in the air around generative AI. This means stock photo sites are still useful.Â
Free stock photo sites for personal use
Here you can find even more great stock photos that are free for personal use, but require a paid plan for commercial use. If you’re just looking for photos for a personal project, check these out:
Freepik offers images, videos, vectors, AI images, icons, fonts, and more, along with extremely detailed filter options that let you narrow your search results by asset type, license, AI-generated, file type, and even color and orientation.
Vecteezy offers a lots of different file types and extensive search filters, including asset type, color, AI-generated, and people—whether they’re included, how many are in the image, and even the type of shot (headshot, waist-up, full-length, or candid).
Flickr doesn’t offer the same quality user experience as many other sites, but it does offer a massive quantity of photos, including much more authentic stock photo options.
Graphic design in Canva
If you’re planning to use stock imagery for social media graphics, marketing collateral, or other templated designs, I’d suggest Canva. Canva is the go-to graphic design software for a reason: it’s super easy to learn and use, with tons of ready-to-use templates.
You can upload stock photos from sites like Pexels and Pixabay into Canva, or search Canva’s own extensive library and photos and other design elements from right within the design flow. The paid version, Canva Pro, offers even more images!
Niche site for images
If you’re looking for a specific type of image, it’s worth seeing if there’s a niche site available. These sites might give you a wider range of options in the specific category you’re looking for.Â
Foodiesfeed offers food photography, including both human- and AI-generated images. New Old Stock publishes vintage photos from the public archives. If you think old photos would match your brand, spend a few minutes scrolling through New Old Stock. Just be sure to double-check licensing requirements on individual photos for commercial use.
Paid stock photos and videos
When you can’t find what you need on the free stock websites, you might want to look into a paid option. So, if you’re looking for something a little more unique (and you have the budget for it), you could check out Shutterstock, iStock by Getty, or Adobe Stock.
These are the ones that have the most images and are super easy to use. You can subscribe to any of these sites for around $30 per month for up to ten monthly image downloads. Â
