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Selecting Stock Photos

Eye-catching stock photos or clever illustrations can add appeal, emphasis or even clarity to digital content.

Humming bird hovering over an orange flower. The hummingbird is shades of green.
Photo by Allec Gomes / Unsplash

What Quality Stock Photos do for Your Site

Great visuals and imagery play a crucial role in setting the vibe and energy of your site—capturing attention and evoking emotions, ideas, or opinions in your visitors' minds.

Stock photos add the most to your website when they are used effectively. We find using images, illustrations, and video to aide in visual storytelling compelling but selecting quality images that highlight your story and elevate your brand can be challenging.

Selecting Images

Visual collateral will evoke different responses in each viewer, influenced by their personal experiences, tastes, state of mind, and more. So yes, it's possible to miss the mark, but then again, that's true for nearly anything. Let's start with...

Brand consistency and visual storytelling goes a long way. If used effectively, stock photos can improve user experience and potential engagement. If you are using stock photos paired with pieces of text, you'll be able to improve your SEO for that page as long as the photo matches the text it is paired with.

License and Usage of Stock Images

Not every photo you find on the internet is free to use for your website. Some photos require attribution or payment for use. We typically try to get stock photos that are free from copyright restrictions or licensed under creative commons public domain (CC01) which you can read more about here.

The sites we are about to list all have photos that are free to copy, modify, and distribute for commercial purposes, but we do encourage you to do your own research on any photos you want to use on your site.

Where to Find Stock Photos

Unsplash

We personally love Unsplash. They offer high-resolution photo collections and are known as one of the best sources for stock photography.

Pixabay

Another site with a wide variety of stock photography. Pixabay also offers stock vectors and other forms of art.

Pexels

Pexels is an easily explorable website with tons of stock photos licensed under Creative Commons Zero (CC0).

Picography

Picography is one of the top sources for free stock photography. Their collection includes high resolution free photos for use in any of your projects.

Reshot

Reshot is a stock illustration and icon website that was initially created for startups. Reshot is a great place to find photos that aren't tacky or too "stocky".

Foca Stock

All photos on Foca are free to use. The photos mainly focus around nature, city scenes, workspaces, and macro photography.

Stocksnap

All photos on Stocksnap are free to use without any attribution. They add photos to their site everyday to keep it fresh.

Feepik

Freepik is a great place for graphic resources. All photos and vectors on Freepik are free to use under creative commons public domain.

ISO Republic

ISORepublic provides curated collections of high quality photos under Creative Commons Zero (CC0).

Freephotos.cc

Freephotos is a resource that allows you to search for creative commons photos to use on your projects.

Cover

Coverr is a free resource for high quality videos. These videos are free to use on any of your projects.

New Old Stock

NewOldStock is a free resource for vintage photos from public archives.

Gratisography

Gratisography has free stock photos that you can use on personal and commercial projects. Photos found in their collection are definitely on the quirky side of things.

Picography

Picography is one of the top sources for free stock photography. Their collection includes high resolution free photos for use in any of your projects.

The Dos and Don'ts of Using Stock Photography

Stock photography has the potential to take your site from being bland to eye catching in the time it takes to refresh the page but, if used incorrectly, it can also hurt the look of your site. Here are our quick dos and don'ts of using stock photography.

Dos

Don’ts

With great stock photos comes great responsibility. There are a lot of stock photo collections out there with different rules on how to use them so make sure to read up on the licenses from any site you use photos from.

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