Because we adore stock photographs just as much as you do and because we understand how difficult it is to locate the appropriate stock photo agency from which to purchase high-quality images we set out to compile a comprehensive list of the finest stock photos sites. There will be no more guesswork or arduous investigation for you. When it's time to purchase stock photographs and high-resolution images heed the experts' advice and simply search for royalty-free images that fit your current demands!

This post will highlight 22 of the top stock photography websites both free and paid.

What Is a Stock Image Website?

Stock image websites are those that offer photographs for personal or commercial usage. They may be provided for free or you may be required to pay a licensing charge to the stock picture website and photographer. Paying a licensing price enables you to use the photograph for personal or commercial purposes (as long as the rules are adhered to) but the artists maintain ownership of their work.

In addition to photographs some stock photography websites include drawings vector pictures video clips motion graphics and music.

Why Should Businesses Marketing Agencies Writers And Creative Professionals Use Stock Images?

Businesses media outlets marketing firms and content providers all require visual material to effectively communicate their messages. You'd want updated images to effectively tell your brand's story via your website and social media pages.

It would be laborious to take photographs for each topic or to choose from your own self-shot archives. Even more inconvenient and costly would be to hire a photographer or graphic designer to develop unique photos as needed.

What Are The Advantages Of Stock Image Websites?

1. The greatest stock photography websites make it incredibly simple for you to
2. Easily search for and obtain a graphic that corresponds to your topic.
3. All photographs are royalty-free.
4. Customize it to meet your creative needs and have access to often updated picture resources.
5. Simply said utilizing the top stock picture sites allows you to save valuable time effort and money when it comes to visual content sourcing.
6. Let's have a look at some of the top stock picture sites available — both free and paid.

The Best Paid Stock Photography Websites

Several of the best are as follows:

It's an excellent place to get stock pictures typefaces audio tracks and web designs thanks to Envato's graphical user interface and Envato Elements.

In addition to all of these visual assets a membership would get you access to the company's instructional materials and business management tools. You may browse their photo collection by tag orientation backdrop and colour to find unique creatively captured images.

For free you may also browse the Twenty20 stock picture repository.

Pricing for Envato Elements

In terms of price the following are the various tiers:

1. Starting at $16.50/month for an individual plan.
2. Each person in a team of five pays $10.75 a month but the cost decreases as the number of members increases.

Canva is a well-known drag-and-drop image editor. Canva Pro is a premium subscription-based service aimed at business customers. It includes an extensive library of photos illustrations icons themes and animations.

This enables you to rapidly develop outstanding on-brand designs share them and communicate with your coworkers.

The best aspect is that you may download an infinite number of files at no additional charge.

Pricing for Canva Pro

For one month you can experience Canva Pro for free. After that it's $9.95 per month if paid annually or $12.95 per month if paid monthly.

In the early days of picture subscriptions Shutterstock was one of the first firms to provide royalty-free photos. You may also get vectors drawings films and music for your projects.

Its brands include Bigstock (a stock media site) Shutterstock Bespoke (a custom content production tool) Offset (a high-end picture collection) PremiumBeat (a curated royalty-free music library) and Shutterstock Editorial (editorial images for media firms) (editorial imagery for media companies).

If you need to modify your photographs Shutterstock offers online editing tools besides being linked with Adobe Creative Cloud program.

Besides accessing it on the web you can also get images via the iOS and Android applications. A Chrome plugin will match every public domain photo you pick on the web to a comparable one on Shutterstock.

It is also connected with Google Slides and MS PowerPoint. A free trial allows you to download up to 10 free pictures for a month.

Shutterstock provides subscription plans and on-demand packs for single users subscriptions for teams and organizations.

For example single-user plans are as follows:

1. A membership of 10 photos each month is $49/month $299/year or $4.9/image.
2. A membership of 50 photos each month is $125/month $979/year or $2.5/image.
3. An on-demand bundle of 5 pictures costs $49 or $9.80/image. You need to download within a year.

DepositPhotos is a royalty-free stock photography site where you can obtain high-resolution images vectors and movies. The easy user interface makes it simple to locate what you're looking for by allowing you to filter by image orientation color and size.

It provides a seven-day free trial during which you may download five photographs every day.

Following that the price structure is as follows:

Monthly subscriptions start at $9.99 per month for ten photos ($1.00 each image).

Annual subscription - Annual subscriptions begin at $99 for ten photos every month ($0.83 per image).

Additionally you may download photographs graphics and films on-demand for a year. Prices begin at $49 for ten photos.

123RF is an excellent budget stock photography website that offers a wide variety of images graphics video clips and music for a shockingly low price.

When you're looking for photographs you may search by category and subcategory and sort them using a variety of filters. The 'trending photographs' and 'new images' sections keep you informed of any newly posted photos.

Additionally the 'featured contributors' section has information on the photographers.

While 123RF offers some free downloads the majority of their content is subscription-based. You may purchase credits on-demand or subscribe to a plan.

The most popular plans include purchasing 40 credits for $45 or a $649 yearly membership that includes 150 photo downloads each year (with a daily limit of 5 photos).

StockPhotoSecrets features a smaller selection of photos and video clips than the others and like Startup Stock Photo is primarily focused for small enterprises.

This is an excellent stock photography source to use when selecting photographs for social media or blog postings.

The good news is that you may download photographs in any size without incurring additional expenses for high-resolution images.

You may purchase subscriptions picture packs and image packs with extended license.

The 99 Club is our most popular subscription offering 200 downloads per year with no monthly limitations for $99. You must pay 99 cents for each extra download.

For less than $8 an image you can get packs of five ten or twenty-five photos. With the extended license picture packs are intended for commercial use on a bigger scale — for example print runs exceeding 300000 or printing on merchandise for sale.

Using Stock Unlimited you can search for and download high-resolution images as well as vectors and clip art. If you plan to use a lot of images and videos over the course of the year this is a great alternative.

In terms of price the following are the various tiers:

For $19 a month or $79 a year you get limitless downloads and a seven-day money-back guarantee.

If you'd rather you may purchase 30 assets for $25 for a year's worth of use.

"Royalty free stock photographs for as cheap as $0.20USD/download or free" are available at Dreamstime. It's easy to find what you're looking for and filter by relevance popularity or most recent upload date. Dreamstime has an iOS and Android app a Wordpress plugin a Google GSuite plugin and a Microsoft Office add-in that you may use. Up to ten pictures can be downloaded for free during a one-week trial. Credit packages and subscriptions are available after that.

Adobe owns Adobe Stock a stock photo service. Pictures movies drawings vectors templates and 3D elements are all included in this collection of handpicked images.

You can go to it directly from the website. It's also part of the Creative Cloud so designers can utilize it in their favorite Adobe program like Photoshop or Illustrator with ease.

Affirming the Value of Adobe Stock

Subscription program for individuals teams and corporations are available through Adobe Stock.

Individuals' plans for example are as follows:

1. Each month you'll receive ten standard pictures for the low price of $29.99 USD.
2. A month's worth of photos at a cost of $79.99
3. US$199/month for 750 standard photos.
4. Also a month-long free trial gives you access to 10 free photos.

Getty Images brings you an enormous variety of pictures vectors drawings videos and audio that encompass creative editorial current and vintage photos from their archive material. The latest offering is free virtual backdrops for your Zoom video sessions.

They also control the stock picture sites iStock (formerly iStockphoto) and ThinkStock.

Besides utilizing the browser version you may download photographs using iOS and Android applications. You may also utilize its Adobe Creative Cloud Wordpress and Chrome plugins. It is also connected with Dropbox.

The cost is among the highest among stock picture sites since they utilize professional photographer services that also have access to elite events like award ceremonies and private gatherings.

You may pick from packages for huge imaging (4K and HD films medium pictures and SD videos tiny imagery and low-res videos. The price slabs are as follows:

Getty Images pricing

You may save up to 30 percent with these Ultra packs alternatives that allow you to buy a particular amount of photographs upfront for a fixed charge.

Storyblocks offers limitless downloads for images films and music handpicked by a global professional photographer team.

By signing up for an account you may create folders download watermarked previews to check out the ideal picture for your personal or commercial project organize your downloads and share folders with your team or clients.

Storyblocks offers a bright and easy UI. All content is royalty-free. So you may use it indefinitely even when your subscription expires.

You’ll discover lots of alternatives for every theme for your personal or business endeavor. But you won’t discover any photographs for your editorial needs.

You may enjoy limitless downloads of photos and movies for $29 a month or $349 a year.

This offers an amazing deal if you require plenty of photos every month as the per-image cost might go down dramatically.

Photocase is a relatively limited selection of well-curated interesting photographs. The shots are taken beautifully and scarcely appear like conventional stock images. This firm is renowned to execute a stringent review procedure for each photograph.

Photocase Pricing

With Photocase you get to buy any photo on demand. They’re priced depending on size from small to huge.

Apart from these premium ones there are many free stock picture sites as well.

But why should you select a paid stock picture site when there are so many free ones available?

You should choose paid stock picture sites in such cases. These distinctions will help you understand better:

Differences Between A Paid Stock Photo Site And A Free Stock Photo Site

Free stock photos sources have varied rights and licenses. Some like Unsplash are absolutely no-strings-attached since they are Creative Commons Zero (CC0 license) or No Rights Reserved.

But you should check the small print on the other stock photography sites to confirm the photo is safe for you to use.

Creatives and bloggers do get into difficulties for utilizing imagery they thought were free to use but were posted by individuals who’d selected it from other sources without authorization.

1. Paid stock picture sites provide a greater range of stock video making it more likely that you’ll locate the ideal snapshot for your creative job.
2. Paid stock photography sites will give you a bigger range of sizes or dimensions before you download your image with the larger better resolution photographs costing you more.
3. Paid stock photography sites will assist you keep track of the stock video you acquired because they demand you to sign in.

So you see it may be sensible to pay for stock photos.

Now let’s look at some of the top free choices.

Best Free Stock Photo Sites

I’ve identified 10 of the top free stock picture sites for you:

Another website containing public domain photographs and eye-pleasing output is Pexels. You may discover a dedicated area with the most popular searches and free films for numerous uses.

This website is incredibly easy to use and offers superb topic classification making surfing fun for the user. But keep in mind that certain photographs are of limited utility. You may check the Pexels license for additional details.

Designers may also discover significant information about each picture such as quality and file size to adjust them to their needs. Mobile app versions for iOS and Android are available too!

Unsplash is one of the most prominent sites with free stock photographs owned by Getty Images which we’ll cover later on. You can download photographs and use them for personal or business purposes. No acknowledgment is necessary even though they highly encourage you to do so! However you are not authorized to utilize these photographs for a competing service.

Overall it welcomes hundreds of photographers worldwide and provides real and current photographs for any taste! Plus you can combine it with your existing marketing platforms like Moosend and embellish your customer-facing material!

Pixabay offers the greatest choice of content for free. This offers free stock photographs drawings vectors video music and sound effects. I hadn’t heard of them until studying for this piece. But after examining their supply I will use them in the future. Their database is huge with over 2.4 million photographs to pick from.

A wonderful element that makes them distinctive is that certain photographs display their metadata. If you’re using stock image websites you probably don’t care too much about the photo’s details. But it gives a lovely touch to some of the photographs almost giving you the impression of more control over them.

Like Unsplash Pixabay leads to a premium site—iStock. But after exploring their inventory I doubt you will even need to pay for this service.

Gratisography is a free stock picture website that touts itself as creative and out of the usual. It's established by graphic and online designer Ryan McGuire –owner of Bells Design– who is also an experimental visual artist. The purpose of the site is to deliver unique more intimate more attractive photographs as opposed to the typical “stocky look”. The tiny collection comprises roughly 450 images all signed by Ryan himself and is of great quality.

These photos are free to download and use no catch. The license is bespoke however it is very much a CC0 licensing model with certain restrictions comparable to Royalty-Free (although it's NOT Royalty Free) such the sensitive use and defamatory use prohibitions. It's to be noted the site specifically indicates their photographs can be subject to privacy and property rights and that while they permit commercial usage they encourage “due diligence” before utilizing photos in commercial projects (which means it's up to you to examine its legal status). However being all photographs owned by Ryan at least you know where they came from.

Burst is another great stock picture site provided by Shopify with royalty-free stock photographs meaning that you may reuse them without a new license. It’s a wonderful platform for businesses that want to put up a gorgeous eCommerce site from scratch with collections for all preferences.

They provide a unique area called “Company Ideas” with eCommerce ideas and picture kits for different product categories making business owners’ life simpler!

LibreShot is a stock picture site by photographer and SEO specialist Martin Vorel - a passion project exactly like the site Little Visuals.

Content makers may get free stock pictures under a Creative Commons license for all usage without a watermark or credit.

You’ll discover a variety of well-composed creative stock photos in categories including architecture rural and wildlife. However if you’re seeking any business-related photographs this free stock photo site isn’t the place to look at.

Foter is a free stock picture service that offers an appealing user experience. It enables you to download stock photos by category and concepts (Appliances Bed & Bath and so on) (Appliances Bed & Bath and so on.)

Once you pick your image verify the license type – whether credit is necessary whether it is acceptable for commercial use and whether it may be changed. Then copy and paste the credit text under your photo.

Foter allows you to sort by color and by license type (commercial or non-commercial) (commercial or non-commercial).

Another feasible choice for you is Reshot which likewise offers unique royalty-free photographs for any requirement. While scanning their site it’s simple to observe their unique aesthetics making it a wonderful resource for bloggers and producers who wish to make a difference.

StockSnap is a standard stock photo website. They have an excellent database but several of the images appear to have been taken with a point-and-shoot camera. This is perfectly acceptable and may even be the ideal image for some people. However when it comes to finding high-quality stock photos it falls short of other sites.

A convenient search feature is the ability to view 'trending' material. This is advantageous because you can determine which images or colors are popular at the moment. On the other hand you can scroll to the bottom to find rare free stock photos.

The premium service of StockSnap is integrated with Shutterstock. I'm not a fan of how they mix premium and free images. The only indicator is a small star located in the upper left corner of each premium image. This is a minor annoyance that has no effect on the browsing experience.

If you're looking for unique free stock photos NegativeSpace is another excellent resource.

You can search for images by color tag or category which includes art and design food and typography.

Conclusion

Stock photography websites have existed for a long period of time. There is now a plethora of services available. It can be overwhelming to search through these massive databases for a specific image, but it all comes down to importance. If you're going to use the image on a website or brochure, keep in mind that the image you choose should reflect your brand. Spend time selecting the image that best conveys your message.

Often, free stock image sites will suffice to locate what you require. However, if you use stock images on a daily basis, it's worthwhile to pay for the services. In reality, you're paying for time savings in addition to the high-quality images.