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101 Ultimate Royalty-Free Stock Photo Websites for 2021
There is no need these days to spend a lot of money on copyright photos to use on your online store and for promotional and advertising purposes. Below are my top 5 free stock photo websites with millions of royalty free, quality photos to use.
So what’s the difference between free and royalty-free photos? Royalty-free means a stock photo has a license that provides for the unlimited use of a photo in any media defined in the licensing terms. Royalty-free is the opposite of rights-managed. A rights-managed photo needs a specific license stating the audience and its use. While royalty-free images offer a broad umbrella of free uses for designers, the images are not inherently free.
Keep in mind that these photos are kindly contributed by professional and amateur photographers, so please remember to include photo credit when requested so the photographer’s skills can be promoted and free photo websites like these can survive and thrive.
ECOMMERCE EYE TOP 4 PICKS
Jumpstory
JumpStory is unique compared to the majority of other stock photo websites because they have high-quality images of real people expressing real emotions. These photos are contributed by thousands of amateur and professional photographers from around the world and then curated by JumpStory’s AI to ensure the best quality photos are made available. A subscription gets you unlimited downloads and full commercial licenses. JumpStory also has over 25 million videos, icons, vector art & illustrations.
Stocksy
Stocksy is a royalty-free stock photo and video website that has unique, authentic images with an emphasis on the artistic element. Because they hand select every artist, photo, and video their entire collection is real, and relevant. These quality standards together with a collection of exclusive images and videos mean finding real assets is a lot easier. The fact that Stocksy is an artist-owned cooperative contributes to a greater level of passion into their work, resulting in inspired imagery of the highest quality.
Alamy
Alamy is another popular stock photo website that has a very large collection of assets, over 260 million stock images, vectors, videos, and 360-degree panoramic images to choose from. Alamy is one of the most diverse stock photo websites. What I like the most about this website is the majority of photos are authentic… real people in real places doing real things. You can browse from 56 different categories. Like other stock photo websites, they also have vectors and video stock footage.
Deposit Photos
Deposit Photos is a quality Royalty-free Stock Photos, Vector Images, Videos, and Music website with over 200 million files to choose from. In addition to their massive collection of stock photography, they have extensive stock video and music libraries where you can find exactly what you need for your next project. You can also access nearly 70,000 free photos, vector images, and videos for commercial and editorial use. The Deposit Photos website also has some very handy editing tools such as a photo background remover.
Librestock
Librestock scans and indexes the best free photos from the top stock photo sites on the internet, allowing you to find the image you’re after, faster and easier. It’s like a one-stop image shop.
Free Images
Free Images boasts over 300,000 free stock photos for personal and commercial use. All photos are categorised. Images can be instantly downloaded and no attribution is required.
Burst
Burst by Shopify allows you to browse thousands of beautiful copyright-free images. All their images are free to download for personal and commercial use with no attribution required.
… More Royalty-Free Stock Photo Websites
9 of the Best Paid Stock Photo Websites
Once upon a time the majority of stock photo websites were not free. Considering there are so many free stock photos websites available these days, paid stock photos surprisingly still have their place in the market. It’s a classic case of “you get what you pay for”, meaning paid stock photo websites provide images that simply aren’t available on free websites. Here are some of the best paid stock photo websites.
ECOMMERCE EYE TOP 4 PICKS
Shutterstock
Shutterstock is one of the leading stock photo websites when it comes to quality images, with over 325 million images. They have over 30 different categories to choose from as well curated collections that feature current trends. Their filters are very powerful and even allow you to filter photos by ethnicity, such as African American. Their website also contains an excellent blog.
123RF
123RF is another one of the big players in the paid stock photo market. It boasts an ISE (Intelligent Search Engine), that utilizes big data and artificial intelligence to predict and find the best results for image searchs. After you’ve found the image, expect faster downloads due to the fact the download will happen from a server located nearest to your region.
Getty Images
Getty Images has just about every category of photo imaginable, but if your looking for archive, news, celebrity or sports stars photos for example, than Getty is the leader by far in this area. Getty’s images therefore can be very expensive due to their exclusive nature. Photos range from $200-$650 per download, so make every purchase count.
Dreamstime
Dreamstime claims to have 170 million stock photos, and the world’s largest stock community of more than 37 million users. But it’s not always about quantity. For me, it’s definitely more about quality and Dreamstime delivers. They not only have quality stock photos, but they also have editorial images, vector art, illustrations, video, and audio. Every week they have a free image.
… More Paid Stock Photo Websites
22 Best Free Public Domain Photo Websites
What is exactly a public domain image? It’s a photo, clip art, or vector whose copyright has expired or never ever existed. These images can be used for personal and commercial purposes, without having to worry about possibly breaching someone’s copyright. The image is assigned to the public domain through a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license or similar license or permission.
The most common providers of these types of images are museums, libraries, and photographers, in some cases as a protest against the flood of stock images now available online.
31 Best Websites To Sell Your Photos
Below are some of the best websites where you can turn your hobby or your product shots into cash.
22 Of The Best Websites To Store Your Photos in the Cloud
You never know when disaster is going to strike, so it’s a very good idea to store your valuable digital images and photos on a photo storage and sharing site in addition to keeping a backup copy locally. Below is a list of some of the best photo storage websites.
15 of the Best Photo Organization Tools
If you have an online store with a lot of product images, sooner or later you’re going to need a good photo organization tool to preview, organize and categorize all of your product photos. The advantage of using a photo organization tool is that you can edit metadata, add keywords, labels, and ratings to assets, and use powerful filters to find one or more photos fast. Below is a list of some of the best free and paid photo organization tools.
17 Of The Best .psd Image Websites
A PSD (Photoshop Document) file is an image file format that is native to Adobe’s Photoshop application. PSDs contain one or more image layers and various imaging options. PSD files are commonly used when high-quality graphics are required. Below are some of the best websites for downloading free and paid .psd files.
29 Of The Best PNG Image Websites
PNG (Portable Graphics Format) files are a lossless data compression format and have a transparent background. This makes this format a popular one for logos and raster images that are usually placed on colored backgrounds or on top of images. Below are some of the best free and paid websites for downloading PNG files.
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