Meaningful cover photos and images on your website, blog or social media posts can beautify the visuals of your contents. They attract more people toward your website or posts and so ensures more views. Besides, quality images are very essential for ecommerce sites. There is a plethora of royalty free stock photos on the web, so you can enrich your contents with them easily.
Many online resources offer huge collections of free stock images that will suit your taste. You can download them for free (unless paid) and use them directly on your website or blog.
What is a Royalty Free Image?
Royalty-Free is a very well known stock photo license. A royalty free image is a photo you can use offered by any stock photos agency (with or without payments) and avoid paying royalties to the actual creator over continual usage of the image.
The creator still holds the copyright but you can use them for free under certain conditions applied by the agency’s user license.
To avoid confusions, a royalty free image does not mean it is also a copyright free image.
Why use Stock Photos?
As we mentioned before that using various images and cover photos really attracts viewers’ attention. Visuals stay in their mind for a longer period of time because human brain processes them 60,000 times faster than texts.
studies show that contents with visuals,
- Get almost 94% more views.
- Are 40 times more likely to be shared on social media platforms.
- Make people spend more time on the content.
In this post we brought 5 best sites for you that offer a vast variety of stock images of large collections and more.
Unsplash
At the top of our list of royalty free stock photos we have none other than Unsplash.
Unsplash was founded in 2013 as a Tumblr blog because it wanted to empower and encourage creativity by sharing royalty free image (no copyright images). Today, Unsplash is the curated home to over 2.5 million free, high-resolution images from more than 210,000 photographers, insane right?
Unsplash also provides apps for iOS, Android, Chrome, WordPress, Figma, and lot more.
Pricing: Completely free of cost with unlimited downloads and usage of the images available.
Pexels
Next on our list we have Pexels, a platform with thousands of free stock photos and videos.
New and high-resolution photos/images are added daily from its huge community of photographers and creators. You can use the site search or browse by filters such as popular collections, topics, color, and many more.
You can also access the Photographer Leaderboard for the most views of photos that are uploaded in the last 30 days or so. Another interesting feature includes challengers to upload photos and videos to win exciting prizes.
Pricing: Absolutely free of cost and unlimited downloads with several resolutions to choose from.
Enjoy this popular site and download free stock photos and videos with one click.
Kaboompics
Up next on our list of royalty free stock photos we have Kaboompics. It houses thousands of photos and images for absolutely free and can even be used for commercial usage.
Kaboompics is a stock photos site by Karolina Grabowska, who has produced over 20,000 images that have been downloaded 23 million times! and because of that it easily grabs the attention of people looking for stock photos and royalty free image. You can either search for stock images or browse by photoshoot, orientation or color palette and also options for custom resolutions.
Kaboompics features a large gathering of lifestyle and inspirational photos and so it is very helpful for ecommerce websites and businesses.
Pricing: All contents are free of cost with unlimited downloads.
Shutterstock
On our paid list of royalty free stock photos is Shutterstock. Shutterstock is a must have resource for royalty-free stock images, photos, vectors, illustrations, videos and music covering a whopping 360 million of items.
Along with it’s huge number of stock images, Shutterstock also offers you editorial stock photos covering news, sports, and entertainment.
Shutterstock comes with a built-in tool to edit and resize any image you want. It also has Offset which offers stock imagery by notable artists.
Pricing: Subscription plans start at $29 for 10 images per month and On-demand packs start at $49 for 5 images with standard license. Even though you can download free images and photos but they will have the default Shutterstock watermark.
iStock (By Getty Images)
Another noteworthy mention in our free stock photos list is iStock (from Getty Images).
It allows you access to millions of quality stock images, photos and videos. You can search by popular categories and other filters, browse featured artists and explore their comprehensive storytelling assets.
iStock’s Essential collection is for daily projects. The Signature collection is for images you will not find elsewhere.
Pricing: The annual subscription plans start at $29 for “Essentials” images only with download limit of 10/month. On-demand packs start at $12 for one credit.
Conclusion
We have covered a variety of options above for getting royalty free stock images (both free and paid choices). Check out all of these huge collections and start making your websites, blogs or posts more eye-catching and appealing to the people. Do not forget to comment bellow and share your suggestions and thoughts.
