Top 10 Free Stock Image Websites for Commercial Use
To be able to offer high quality ad-free content for the readers, some Explained articles contain affiliate links, which may receive a small commission at no additional cost to readers.
Often in UI Design, you will face situations where you need stock images to spice up your views or to be used as placeholder content for user added images such as profile images or posts. This article summarizes the top 10 free stock image websites for your next project.
#10 Stocksnap.io
Free images with Creative Commons CC0 license for personal as well as commercial projects.
#9 Moose
Moose by Icons8 has excellent collection of professional looking stock images. Instead of limiting images premium and free, users can download any image with limited quality for free but attribution is required.
#8 pngtree
Pngtree has a good collection of images with transparent background. They have own free section, and additionally you are allowed to download 2 premium images everyday free of charge. Additionally pngtree has also a collection of templates, illustrations, and backgrounds.
#7 Burst
Burst offers free stock photos for websites and commercial use powered by Shopify. Here you will find good collection of business related photos.
#6 UI Faces
No more googling “user profile image”, UI faces gives you powerful filters to find exactly the face you are looking for. You can select photos from variety of sources as well as search by age, gender, hair color and face emotion. Excellent tool for personas, profile mockups and other user related content.
#5 Picspree
Picspree offers royalty free images, stock photos, illustrations, and vectors free for personal and commercial use. Their main categories include nature, food, animals, travel and business photos. Free photos don’t require attribution.
#4 Pixabay
Pixabay, owned by Canva, has over 2.3 million+ high quality stock images, illustrations, vectors, videos and music shared by the community. This is one of my go to websites especially if I am looking for free stock footage. Free for commercial use, no attribution required.
#3 Freepik
If I am looking for vector backgrounds or illustrations, Freepik is my first choice. Since 2010, Freepik has offered free vectors, stock photos and PSD and a surprising amount of the content is free. The free content is usually high quality but often attribution is required.
#2 Pexels
Next to Pixabay, Pexels is one of the first websites I go to if I am looking for free stock footage. All photos on Pexels are free and attribution is not required. Collection is wide, which makes it a good place for searching any image or video you are looking for.
#1 Unsplash
Unsplash is dedicated to sharing stock photography under the Unsplash license that allows commercial and non-commercial use without attribution. Since 2021, it has been owned by Getty Images. The website claims over 207,000 contributing photographers and generates more than 17 billion photo impressions per month on their growing library of over 2 million photos. What makes it my current favorite is the Unsplash Figma Plugin that lets you insert beautiful images from Unsplash straight into your designs.
