Searching for high-quality photos from different websites is a tedious process, and licensing them costs a lot of money.
Those of you who are involved in the construction of websites or programs know that the use of photos is not really free of charge, although in Greek reality the various small websites they use photos που βρίσκουν στο διαδίκτυο χωρίς όμως ποτέ να αγοράζουν κάποια άδεια χρήσης. Αυτό όμως εγκλείει κινδύνους καθώς όταν η ιστοσελίδα starts to gain traffic then the copyright holders of those photos may demand an exorbitant amount for theft and lost profits.
But there are several websites on the internet that offer free, high quality photos. Today we will give you 10 best websites for free photos where you can visit and see what they offer.
However, check your permissions before you start downloading and using the free photos you can find. The fact that it is free does not mean you can use it in any way. Some of these photos are public with free license, and others are just free, but their use may be limited (for example, not to allow commercial use, etc.). It's best to first understand the various copyright licenses so you know exactly what you can do with an image.
1. Morguefile
The site Morguefile is one of the oldest, free, high quality photos and as it states has stored over 350.000 tracks. Since it is an old website, some photos are too old (for example, ten or more years old), which may not be fashionable yet still good. You'll also find many recent images on various topics.
2. pixabay
The website Pixabay offers over 740.000 photos in stock, vectors, art and video images, and the best is all licensed according to Creative Commons CC0. This means that you can download, modify, distribute and use them freely in any commercial or non-commercial activity. The reference to their website is not necessary, but it is a small gesture in exchange for free use.
3. Pexels
The Pexels, whose name looks a bit like the pixels, is another great website with hundreds of thousands of free photos in stock. Every day 100 adds new, high-quality photos, so the collection is constantly growing. As for the licenses, CC0 is again, which means that these photos are free to use for any legitimate purpose without having to seek permission from the creator. One of the nice features of the site is that you can search for color-based images.
4.Flickr
We assume that you already know it Flickr as a place to upload your photos, but you probably do not know it's also one of the biggest warehouses of high quality free photos. Many users choose to make their personal photos available on a royalty-free basis. However, be careful because it's not all on Flickr's free copyright. Please carefully review the license for each photo you intend to use.
5. Free Images
As you can guess from his name, the Free Images is a website with free pictures. This area contains about 4000.000 images without all the high quality photos. Additionally, there are some of the photos that are restricted by a license and so check before using a photo, especially if it is a commercial use.
6. Wikimedia Commons
The website Wikimedia Common, with 33 millions of images, is probably the largest free image store. However, in some cases money is needed. They have images of any subject imaginable, but not all of them high quality. There are also many small pictures with somewhat limited practical use.
7 Unsplash
That's it Unsplash is another very popular site for free high quality photos. His images are licensed under the CC0 license. What we really like on this website is its militaristic and clean environment.
8. Free Digital Photos
The Free Digital Photos is an old and established site with free and royalty-free images. Unfortunately, however, generally only small sizes are free, and some of them require money.
9. New Old Stock
This site is different from the rest because it is quite niche. OR New Old Stock specializes in free, high-quality vintage photos. If you're into old stuff, you can find some real gems in here. It has no function search, and her photos are hosted on other sites as well, but it's still a nice collection of unique vintage photos from around the web.
10. Picjumbo
The website Picjumbo offers a user account both free and paid. Naturally, the paid user account offers more, but their free account is pretty good too. There are images in many categories and new free photos are added regularly. One of the unique features of Picjumbo is that it has a Photoshop plugin and a sketch plugin ($7,99).
More generally
There are dozens of websites with free high quality photos, so it's not fair to say that this list contains them all. Most of the sites listed do not have the millions of photos contained in the top commercial photo websites, but this is not necessarily a downside - if you have the patience to search. If you can not find a specific image from these sites with free photos then you can always try your luck with a reverse image search engine, such as Googlee.
