If you have a hard time sourcing images for your website and don’t have a professional editing suite you might want to try some of these free online resources. Images are powerful drivers of opinion and action so giving them careful thought and treatment is rewarding! If you want more details about sourcing free content and the rules surrounding use of images online, please read my previous article Free Content for Commercial Use.
Free Image Sources
- Unsplash – our favorite, but then everyone’s favorite;)
- PXhere – a few more Asian options here
- RawPixel
- Burst by Shopify
- Jay Mantri – good details, architecture, patterns
- Fancycrave – some nice packs like typography in the world, patterns, clean power
- Kaboompics – smaller collection but nice and allows search by color
- Moose – nice minimal images but requires a link attribution to use free
- Death to Stock – quality monthly photo packs by email or small subscription
- Stocksnap
- Pixabay
- Free Images
- Free Range
- Startup Stock
- Pexels – Good selection of women of different ethnic backgrounds
- The Stocks – a collection of free sources
Vintage
- New Old Stock
- RawPixel Public Domain – They have made free to the public some wonderful antique illustrations
Online Compression Tools
If you have downloaded a lovely free image from above or screengrabbed something and find that it is much too large (>100kb) to put on your website, you can use one of these tools to reduce the file size.
- TinyPNG (also accepts JPG)
- Compress JPEG
- UXPRO – compression, responsive breakpoints, image resizer for social, enhance/upsize
Online Photo Editors
If you don’t have PhotoShop but want to edit your images, these tools have at least some basic free options. And yes you’ll see some ads along the way:)
