Top Free Image Resources for Blogging, Social Media, and Marketing Materials

According to a HubSpot compilation of statistics on the use of visuals:

• Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images.
• Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without images.
• In an analysis of over 1 million articles, BuzzSumo found that articles with an image once every 75-100 words received double the social media shares as articles with fewer images.

Thing is, if you’re publishing lots of blog posts, social media updates, and marketing assets, the cost of purchasing stock images and royalty fees can add up. But fear not, here are some great free image resources you can turn to.

Unsplash – This site is one of my favorites. It features beautiful, hi-resolution images contributed by a community of photographers. A word of caution: This site is a potential time waster as you may keep scrolling through the beautiful images from around the world. 

Their policy is as clear and straightforward as it gets:

All photos published on Unsplash can be used for free. You can use them for commercial and noncommercial purposes. You do not need to ask permission from or provide credit to the photographer or Unsplash, although it is appreciated when possible.

Wikimedia Commons – With over 42 million images, you can pretty much find what you need on this site. Images are free to use under a creative commons licenses which generally means including attribution.  

Wikimedia Commons is free. Everyone is allowed to copy, use and modify any files here freely as long as they follow the terms specified by the author; this often means crediting the source and author(s) appropriately and releasing copies/improvements under the same freedom to others.

Pixaby – This site has over a million photos, vector graphics, illustrations, and videos with a robust search engine to help you efficiently narrow your search to find just the right image. 

Like Unsplash, the terms of use are clear:

You can copy, modify, distribute, and use the images, even for commercial purposes, all without asking for permission or giving credits to the artist.

The internet is filled with sites that offer free images but many of them come and go and often have terms of use that are less than clear. The three listed here have been around for some time to so ahead and bookmark the sites.