Free Stock Photography

There are many websites where you can find free stock photos however I have restricted this list to websites whose collection is made up of high quality non-commercial looking photos that are under the CC license system or similar and allow for commercial use. If you are not already familiar with them I recommend you read more about licences here before using any free stock photos.

KaboomPics

KamboomPics is a collection of free photos from Polish Photographer and Designer Karolina. She has hundreds of stunning photos free for commercial use with no attribution required, (however she does appreciate a little mention if you want to support her work). There are lots of shots of office desk layouts, technology, stationery, city scenes and landscapes.

Unsplash

Unsplash adds 10 new photos every 10 days to its ever growing collection. Created by the team at Crew, who provide a platform to bring designers and clients with projects together, Unsplash is one of the original free stock image websites of quality photos. It was originally created for designers so the quality of the photos is very high. Their landscape and nature shots are particularly impressive.

StockSnap

Curated by the guys at Snappa, StockSnap is a collection of photos from their network of photographers and the best free stock photos from around the web. Adding hundreds of photos each week, the StockSnap team make sure that only the nicest photos are included in their collection. Stocksnap also has a great search function and also tracks views and downloads so you can see which photos are the most popular.

Rawpixel

Rawpixel has an amazing collection of beautiful, inspiring free stock photos. The great thing about Rawpixel is that they have legal model releases for any recognizable person in their photos making such images free for commercial use. To download photos from Rawpixel you do need to create a free account using your email, but according to their Privacy Policy they do not share this information with any third parties. I think you'll agree that the quality of their photos makes it well worth signing up!

SplitShire

SplitShire is Italian designer and photographer Daniel Nanescu's large collection of photos. Knowing how hard it is to find good quality, free photos for design, Daniel decided to start sharing his photos for other designers, bloggers and marketers to use for free. You can browse by selecting one of his 21 categories (including, fashion, landscapes, things, and backgrounds) or use the search bar.

Life of Pix

Created by Leeroy Advertising agency to share free stock photos from their network of photographers with other designers and advertisers. The collection features a lot of great landscape and cityscape photos.

Picjumbo

Created in 2013 by designer and photographer Viktor Hanacek. The site is a collection of more than 800 of Viktor's photos. Picjumbo has a very cool Test Drive feature which gives you some examples of how the image could be used. You can browse by categories and tags or use the search bar.

Negative Space

Their collection is not quite as extensive as some of the other sites but the photos they do have are all high quality. The thing I like about Negative Space is the ability to filter your search by copy space (i.e. space for text) as well as colour and category.

Pixabay

Pixabay has a collection of over 550 000 free photos, vectors and videos. It has a very extensive search function so you can filter results by image type, size, orientation, colour and category. While there is a lot of great images on Pixabay there is also a lot of junk so it's not a site that you'd just browse through. You are best to know what type of image you are looking for and, with keywords, using the search function.