With the popularity of visually-oriented social networks like Pinterest and Instagram, it probably comes as no surprise to you that graphic content – images, photographs, and illustrations – plays an important role on the web. But how important?
Research from OkDork and Buzzsumo suggests that they’re incredibly important. They analyzed millions of articles and came to the conclusion that posts with at least one image are shared twice as often on Facebook and Twitter as posts without images. According to Jeff Bullas, articles with images get a total of 94% more views than articles without images. With stats like that, why wouldn’t you add images to your articles? It’s clear that simply including visual content on your blog can make a huge impact on visitors from social media. Plus, there are so many themes out there that thrive on powerful imagery.
So where do you find these great images?
Keep reading for some genuine image searching advice from a blogger who has found visuals for hundreds of blog posts. Or, if you’re just looking for the list of free sites, click the button below!
Just take me to the free stuff!
Purchase Stock Photography (Not Free)
You could buy stock photos. There are millions of photos out there in easily-searchable image galleries that stock photography companies would love to sell you. Photographers have taken the time to illustrate even the most blasé or abstract topics and catalog them with all kinds of keywords so that you can always find that perfect woman laughing alone with salad photo. You can’t deny that it is easy to find exactly what you are looking for.
Or is it? Coschedule’s Julie Neidlinger makes an excellent case against using stock photos. Stock photos are boring. It’s not always easy to find an image that is exactly right for the content you are trying to create. And stock photos are, well, stock photos. They just ooze generic-ness.
Not just that, but they can cost a pretty penny, too, and since you’re reading this I’m guessing you’re not into spending a lot of money on this. Sure, some stock images are available for just $1, but if you need to buy two images a week you’re already out over $100 for the year just on stock photos. $1 isn’t the norm though as far as stock photography goes. Many services require a subscription, which is inconvenient because you can quickly run out of credits for the day or lose unused ones. And there are lots of really nice “premium” stock photos, but they can come with a “premium” price tag of $30 or even $50. Ouch.
Fortunately, there’s still hope! There are a number of free ways you can jumpstart your blog’s imagery.
Embed Stock Photography (Free)
Getty Images created quite a stir when they announced last year that they were making more than 50 million of their stock images freely embeddable. Bloggers rejoice! Finally, those wonderfully generic photos are within reach!
And it’s true, Getty’s embeddable library gives you all the ease of use of their obsessively catalogued image search for the price of… free reign over a little window of your site.
Huh?
Let me embed a happy salad woman to help demonstrate:
There has literally never been a kid so happy about salad.
It’s true, I found the perfect smiling salad eater in about 5 seconds. I literally searched “happy salad” and there were over 1700 results.
But all I can do is copy the code over. I can’t use the image as my featured image (saving a copy to my website is against their terms of use) for my post. I can’t edit the image in any way, including cropping it. And those sneaky sharing icons that appear when you hover over the image don’t share this post – instead, they share the image with a link to Getty’s site. No fair!
Not only that, but embeds slow things down. If Getty’s site goes down, that box will break. If Getty decides they no longer want to make that particular image available for embedding purposes, the box will break. And for those of you concerned about privacy, sorry, but Getty’s totally tracking you right now.
Getty embeds can be a good option for you if you need a really specific image and you don’t mind all the downsides, but if you’re serious about your blog you’re going to want more editorial control over your imagery.
Create Your Own (Free…ish)
You could take photos yourself. This could really work for you if you are a great photographer and you own a good camera already. Especially if you are a food blogger or you are a jet-setting world traveler. Even with a smartphone, if you routinely are in exotic settings or you’re good at making your life look exotic on Instagram, you might be set.
But that’s a lot of work, not to mention the expense of a decent camera if you don’t already have one. Good cameras ain’t cheap.
Then there’s the fact that no matter what fancy equipment you put in our hands, some of us are just destined to suck at taking photos. Hiding behind your Instagram filters can only work for so long.
So if building on your budding photography skills is just not for you, what else?
Well, you can still create your own imagery. If you are a doodler, capitalizing on your own personal style and talents can really set your blog apart and help with your branding. Same goes if you are any kind of artist, really. It’s defunct now, but Clay Baboons was the blog of an artist who illustrated her posts with… that’s right, clay characters!
There are also some pretty sweet image creation tools out there that give you vectorized icons, shapes, and elements for creating graphics totally from scratch. My favorite is Canva. They’re building up an awesome reputation among bloggers for being a super easy image editor. You can use their service to do everything from put filters over images (à la Instagram) to create your own infographics.
Borrow Other People’s Images (Free)
Instead of creating all the imagery on your site, it is perfectly acceptable to use others’ photos (except perhaps in some food/DIY niches where not using your own imagery is viewed as sort of deceptive). But you can’t just grab any image off of Pinterest or Google Image Search. This kind of “borrowing” is actually really illegal, and if you “borrow” images from the wrong people, they can sue you for a lot of money. You would have been better off buying that camera and some photography classes.
If you want to borrow photos, you have to do it the right way. The right way involves doing a Creative Commons (CC) search and selecting a photograph with licensing requirements that match your end goals.
The idea behind Creative Commons is that the internet is a collaborative space, and being able to build upon and adapt each others’ work only makes our involvement in the internet more awesome. Photographers can release their images as Creative Commons by uploading them to a common CC image source like Flickr or Wikipedia. At its core, any CC image out there you should be able to use as long as you provide credit to the author, usually by linking back.
However, this is where it gets a little murky. There are different types of CC licenses. Some ask that you not use images commercially. Others ask that you not modify the work, but you can use it to illustrate something as long as you credit the creator. Many CC search engines don’t make these distinctions very clear. And what exactly is commercial use? If I pop an image on a tshirt and sell it, that’s pretty clearly commercial use. But what if I use the image on a company blog? Or at the top of an article with affiliate links, which earn me money if my readers buy something through them? Are those cases commercial use?
Don’t get me wrong, Creative Commons images are an incredible resource for bloggers, and they make it so much easier to illustrate your blog. And all they cost is a link and a shoutout. Just make sure you are carefully reading image licenses before you use them, especially if you are making money.
There are lots of amazing Creative Commons search tools out there. Here are a few good ones (PhotoPin is my favorite):
Use these tools to find images you won’t get sued for using on your blog featuring everything from coffee to monster trucks. Just make sure you credit the photographer (linking the image to its origin page or crediting the photographer by name at the end of your post are both commonplace ways to do so, but don’t quote me, I’m not a lawyer) and check the licenses.
Use Completely Free Photos (Free!)
After seeing how difficult it can be just to get a nice photo to slap up beside some text on your blog, that heading might sound a little bit like if I told you fairies and unicorns exist. Yes, in fact, there are photographers who are posting their images online, free for others to use however they want, without giving credit. In fact, some of these images are even quite high in resolution. They’re also high in quality, considering that many of the people who share these photos are professional photographers.
Wat?
My entire worldview changed the first time I discovered one of these sites, the well-loved and well-respected free image source Unsplash. I basically said this to myself:
This… this changes everything.
I pored over their archives, utterly enthralled, and started saving everything. I immediately started trying to create my own semi-searchable file system, saving photos with names like “girl backpack travel walking city.jpg” and “bike rack city street cars buildings.jpg” – it wasn’t pretty. You see, the one major weakness of these sites is that they are poorly categorized and tagged with searchable keywords. The photographers simply don’t have the motivation – they’re not making money off of selling the images, after all.
Still, you never know what you are going to find. Here are some of my favorite totally free (“do whatever you want”) image sources:
- Unsplash – general, lots of photographs with filters on them. Click the filter for “all” to see even more images
- Gratisography – quirky collection of photos of people and things
- Picjumbo – general but lots of shots of people and technology. Some searchable categories
- Jay Mantri – lots of outdoors shots of cities, landscapes, and architecture
- Magdeleine – beautiful shots of landscapes and animals, often with filters on them
- Cupcake – photos of beautiful places
- Kaboompics – clean, modern imagery
- Picography – lots of outdoor shots
- Death to the Stock Photo – people and things, high quality collection delivered to your email
- Startup Stock – modern office and technology photos
- Life of Pix – general, mix of landscapes and close-ups, some with filters
- Stokpic – general, some with filters
- IM Free – curated collections of free photos, organized by topic
- Realistic Shots – mix of landscapes and technology close-ups
- Barn Images – mostly outdoors shots
- Public Domain Archive – vintage and modern images
- MorgueFile – searchable database of free photos of medium quality
- Pixabay – searchable collection of free photos contributed by members
- PhotoEverywhere – travel photographs from around the world, searchable with a map
- Foodie’s Feed – shots of food and ingredients
- Snapwire Snaps – mostly outdoorsy photos
- Albumarium – browse curated “albums” of free images by category
- SplitShire – general images of people, places, and things
- StockSnap.io – general images, some with filters
- Freerange Stock – searchable database, free signup to download
- Little Visuals – no longer updated; sadly, the photographer has passed away
For a while, going through Unsplash’s archives, and others like it, was exciting. It was a bit like exploring a treasure trove of beautiful imagery.
But very quickly it started to become a major drag. It is really hard to find what you are looking for without the ability to search. I swear I’ve seen an image of a teapot on Unsplash, now WHERE IS IT…
Thankfully, I recently discovered that there are awesome people putting together searchable free photo aggregators that pull together images from some of these great free photo sites. There are a number of these popping up, but here are my three favorites:
They each return different results, so for me there is no clear winner. I tend to start looking for something on Stock Up, then move through the others.
Here is what the same search (“tea”) looks like across all three:
Stock Up:
Pexels:
FindA.Photo:
FindA.Photo has some unique features the other two lack, though it also (for the time being) appears to have the most limited collection. They have pulled images into a few popular categories, and offer the ability to search by source, hex color, saturation, size, and aspect ratio, which you can read about on their tips page. Here are some of the options you have for exploring their collection, right from the homepage:
The color search is incredibly useful if you are trying to find an image to match an existing color scheme, and the feature seems to be one of the best-developed ones on the site.
I love these free image search tools, and one of the best things about them is that they will only get better with time – all of them are adding more photos on a regular basis, sometimes dozens or hundreds per week.
I highly recommend you get as many photos for your blog as possible from free sources, where there is no question what the licensing requires. This also gives you the freedom to reuse images around your site without worrying who to credit.
I hope you found this list of the best free image sources for your website or blog useful!
Found a free image source I haven’t included? Please share it in the comments below and I’ll add it!
