Free Stock Photos that Don’t Look Like Stock Photos

When choosing photos for your website, you have three choices:

1. Use Your Own Photos (but it’s hard, time consuming and can be expensive).
2. Buy Stock Photos (but they are expensive and scream “that’s a stock photo”) .
3. Steal Photos from other sites (you know you’re not supposed to do this).

So what are you left with? There are a few great sites that have free stock photos (without the dreaded fake stock photo look). These resources actually have photos with style and great visual impact.

Unsplash

Unsplash is my favorite place to get free stock photos that don’t look like stock photos. There is a good selection of nature, technology and other visually compelling images. They add 10 new stock photos every 10 days.

Sample Images:

Little Visuals

The selection at Little Visuals is not as large as Unsplash, but there is still good quality. Most images are landscapes and nature focused but there also good textures and machinery shots.

Sample Images:

picjumbo

picjumbo has a vary wide selection of stock photos. There are photos of current technology, which can be useful on sites with a more modern edge. Good categorization makes this site easy to find the photo you need, although you will have to dodge the ads.

Sample Images:

New Old Stock

When you are looking for images that have a true vintage feel, New Old Stock is the place to go. All photos are old enough that the rights have expired and they are free to use.

Sample Images:

Picography

Picography has a good selection of travel and scenery images. They are very high resolution, which can come in handy for those full screen parallax sections on your new site.

Sample Images:

Where do you get your stock photos?