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.
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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.
Best free stock photo sites
There are many websites with free stock photos and videos, but this is 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 as 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.
How to find the best websites with 100% free stock photos
- Burst is for eCommerce companies. Powered by Shopify, so very business-friendly. Free stock photos and royalty-free images Download stunning photos for websites and commercial use.
123RF is for a mix of AI-generated and stock photos. 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.
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
