The best stock image site for graphic designers is Adobe Stock, thanks to its wide image selection, great licensing terms, affordable pricing, and responsive customer support. Our review and assessment of Envato Elements highlighted its exceptional value to creatives mindful of their expenses. Envato Elements emerges as the most economical subscription service for royalty-free stock photos, with prices starting as low as $16.50 a month or $11.50 for students. This minimal monthly charge unlocks unlimited access to over 13 million assets available on the platform. Picography contains beautiful free stock photos submitted by Dave Meier and various other photographers. Reshot is a massive library of handpicked free stock photos you won’t find elsewhere.
If you’re on the hunt for photos with impeccable color palettes, composition, and impressive use of negative space, you’ll find more than a few on Kaboompics. This site was founded by talented photographer Karoline Grabowska and has over 17,000 exquisite photos, many of which are in the interior design and lifestyle category. For food bloggers and content creators in the restaurant space, Foodiesfeed is a must-have. Organized by category, the site’s images are high quality and easy to find.
Do graphic designers create their own images?
New photos are added daily from a wide variety of categories including abstract, fashion, nature, technology and much more. Foca is a collection of high resolution photos provided by Jeffrey Betts. PikWizard is under the same ownership as DesignWizard, which offers online design software. Conveniently, you can take a photo from PikWizard straight to the DesignWizard editor. If you’re looking for something unique and different, try Gratisography. The whimsical, quirky, and entertaining photos you’ll find here are unlike any others.
You’ll find millions of free stock photos, videos, and vector graphics at Vecteezy. In this competitive digital arena, content creators, brands, and marketers need great visuals if they want their projects to stand out. Fortunately, there are millions of high-quality stock photos, illustrations, vector graphics, and even stock video footage to help bring your most eccentric ideas to life. Free stock photos are great resources for designers because they are easy to find and can save you money. However, it’s important to understand how to use these images properly so you don’t end up with a copyright infringement problem down the road.
The Public Domain Review
For those needing more flexibility and broader rights, traditional stock sites might be a better fit. However, for overall value, Envato Elements proves to be an impressive contender. In 2013, the site launched as a simple Tumblr blog with a small number of photos added each week.
The Enhanced License stands as a blend between the Standard and Extended licenses and comes with an approximate price tag of $100 per image. ISO Republic offers a broad range of photos; they add new images every day under for free under the CCO license. Life of Pix is a resource created by the LEEROY creative agency offering free high-resolution photos with no copyright restrictions. FoodiesFeed offers thousands of beautiful realistic free food pictures in high resolution. Marc has been featured in publications like Forbes, Business Insider, Yahoo Finance, and MSN for various business ventures, including a portfolio of successful photography websites. The downside is, you’ll need to create an account since you can’t download from this stock photo site unless you’re logged in.
Designers’ faves
Whether you’re designing a website, social media image, brochure, poster, or just about anything else, photos and images are critical elements of the design. The images you use will either enhance your design or detract from it. Since images have such a massive impact on your overall design, it’s essential to use high-quality photos and graphics. It’s well-known that quality stock photos improve the worth of your design, especially when used in advertising. Good graphic designers know how to choose and use stock photos, and those are the ones that get paid well above the average.
- Morguefile currently contains 9,148 pages at 24 photos each page, and the photos are very good resolution.
- If you’re on the hunt for photos with impeccable color palettes, composition, and impressive use of negative space, you’ll find more than a few on Kaboompics.
- That’s where stock image platforms specially tailored for designers come in.
- Stocksy is a cooperative of creatives offering authentic photos and videos produced by industry professionals.
- In order to stand out among the huge crowd, Dreamstime photographers often put their photos in the free section of the site.
The site also allows other photographers to share their images with users while adhering to the rules of the public domain. Any user photos are also evaluated before publishing and must meet quality standards. It offers over a million professional photos, graphics, templates, mockups, and other design and illustration stock images for designers resources. As you’ve probably noticed, there are amazing free stock images all over the web. The downside is, they really are ALL over the web, including your competitor’s websites. Subscriptions start at $24.92 per month for 30 images, going up to $166.58 for 750 images, translating to $1.44 to $0.22 per image.
Vecteezy
Free Media Goo has a memorable name for a not-so-memorable site; it certainly has some good features, but is more a niche search engine. The site was created by web developers for web developers, hence the presence of free Flash and audio as well as stock photos. Alongside free stock photos, the site also has free textures, audio and Flash movies.
Downloading photos from free stock image sites may be more affordable, but it definitely isn’t a wise idea. That’s where stock image platforms specially tailored for designers come in. One of the main resources for graphic designers is stock photo websites, like Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, or Getty Images.
Rawpixel Public Domain
One downside to Adobe Stock, and Adobe as a whole, is their slightly unsatisfactory customer support, which, however, fares better than Getty Images. Despite having chat and email support options, live chat representatives frequently struggle with resolving issues and often pass on inquiries to other team members. There are a number of different categories and collections you can browse through, and of course, you can also search the site.
Canva is well-known for its free design software, but many people don’t realize that Canva also offers an excellent selection of photos, both free and premium. Canva acquired Pexels and Pixabay, and many of the photos you’ll find at those two sites are now also available at Canva. Today, Unsplash offers more than 2 million photos from over 200,000 different photographers. In 2021, Unsplash was acquired by Getty Images, but Unsplash continues to provide free photos to designers, content creators, and anyone else looking for free images. If you’re looking for stock photography sites that are out of the ordinary, check out Gratisography, certainly one of the most innovative stock photo sites on the web. Head over to Startup Stock Photos — another niche stock site, where you’ll find thousands of high-quality images of office environments and startup boardrooms.
The color filter is especially awesome because you can quickly find photos that feature a specific color and will work with your brand’s color palette. Of course, you can also filter by license type if you want to see only the free photos. If you have the time to download and tag all of them every day, you could build quite a library of photos. You won’t find isolated shots, and photos are frequently just a tiny bit lower quality than you’d pay for.
