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Having a great picture that compliments your blog post can really add value and catch more eyes. The hard part is finding a quality pic that isn’t copyrighted and/or has a creative commons license. Here’s a list of the absolute best sites that have millions of free great images for your blog or presentation.
Creative Commons Image Search is one of my favorites because it searches Google Images, Yahoo Images, Flickr and several other sites. Another great feature about cc search is that it provides free licenses and other legal tools to protect and share your own work.
PicApp is also becoming one of my favorite blog pic resources.One feature I find very useful is the option to search either creative OR editorial pics. It also gives you alignment and sizing options in the website to configure the images before you put it in your blog.
Stockvault has a huge variety of free stock photos that are organized very well by category. They also have several handy tutorials.
FlickrStorm is a site off of flickr that searches photos with all licenses. (You can click on advanced to filter by images only with cc licenses.) I use this site often to brainstorm visuals for presentations and blogs.
PhotoXpress is set up in an interesting way. To be honest, it’s a little MLMish. You start off with (I think) being able to download one image per day. If you add their facebook app to your page, you add four more downloads per day and so on. It’s worth the couple minutes registering if you want free medium quality (and I say quality not in reference to the pic but the people and things in the pic) stock imagery.
MorgueFile is a database for free photos, portfolios, discussions, news etc… I stick with the free photos. (just make sure the drop down menu by the search says what your looking for) They have a huge library of stock photos but you do have to register.
Everystockphoto searches many of the above sites. If you click advanced options, the list of sites can be edited as well as the image license you want. This is a great site for starting off to see whats out there. I don’t use it exclusively because I find it misses photos on some of the sites it searches.
Stock.xchng is a great free photo site that additionally has useful resources such as blogs and tutorials.
Last but certainly not least. Flickr Creative Commons. The creative commons are organized by every type of cc license. You’ll see a short explanation on the right hand side for each. (Make sure you know exactly which one you need) Currently, they have a combined total of over 126 million CC images. And make sure to try sorting by most interesting. Thats where the best photos are!
Which site do you prefer? Let me know in the comments!
Joel Widmer is the Founder & CEO of Fluxe Digital Marketing—a content marketing shop that helps smart businesses create, produce and promote their content through a unique one-on-one interview process. When he’s not working, Joel can be found trying new restaurants with his wife, son, and daughter.