If you have your own website, whether it’s a blog about your life or a hobby website: you need textual images in addition to text. The best, nicest and safest thing is of course to use your own photos. Then you know for sure that you are the owner. Sometimes you don’t have certain images and then it becomes dangerous: you can’t just pick photos from the internet. These are five websites with free royalty-free photos.
Freeimages
Freeimages is a reliable site because it comes from GettyImages, a well-known press agency for photos. It is a website where you can see a wealth of photos, but beware: they are not all free. First of all you can click on ‘Free Images’ on the tab approximately in the middle of your screen. Then scroll down a little and you will see “Free computer Images and Royalty-free Stock Photos”. Here are the photos that you can use for free. It does state who sent in the photo, so if you still want to give credit to that person, you can.
Pixabay
Pixabay is similar to Freeimages somewhere, but you don’t have to select here that you only want to view the free photos. You will also see paid photos (this time from Shutterstock) in the search results, but scroll down a little and sometimes you have many pages of photos to choose from. Certainly if you often search for the same topics, then you will find that you actually get the same options quite often, so in that case also check the other websites from this article regularly.
Pexels
The same goes for Pexels, although you don’t have to scroll here before you get to your free gold. You will immediately see all kinds of free images here. What is nice is that it is clearly indicated under each photo that it is free to use. If you are still a bit unsure about it, then you have a little more certainty about it.
Dreamstime
Dreamstime is a bit more complicated than Pexels, because this site is primarily intended as a page for paid photos. But, it also has a very original database with free photos. Fortunately, they are immediately at the top. When you click on a photo, you immediately see a penny on it with “Royalty free photo”. This shows that you can use the photo for free. You can also use filters here, such as by price or license, so that you do not have to click on each photo individually to discover whether it is indeed a ‘Royalty free photo’.
Google Images
A commonly used page for free photos, that is Google Images, but it has some snags. The way to use Google Images for free photography is to look for something, then go to “Tools” and “Usage Rights”. Select here that you can use them for commercial reuse and you can see photos that are free to use. At least, that’s how they are flagged by certain people. In this case, it is not always the case that a photo is actually royalty-free, so try to use photos that come via Wikipedia, for they are always royalty-free. We especially recommend Google Images if you really can’t find it on the sites above, but be careful with it.
With the above sites you make your own website a lot more attractive, but we maintain that personal photography often offers added value over stock photos that your readers may also encounter elsewhere.