Most photographers want money for their work, just like everyone else wants to get paid for their work. It’s only fair that they expect to be paid for what they do. After all no one wants to spend their time working and not getting paid.
But some photographers just love taking pictures. They do i for the love of photography, or because they want to give back in some way. These are the types of photographers who release their photos into the public domain, or under Creative Commons licenses.
There are thousands of sites out there where photographers offer their photos for free, but it’s not easy searching through all those sites individually. Fortunately, there are some large databases of photos that collect a lot of the in one place—with the photographers’ permission, of course.
Let’s take a look at some of the best places you can go t find free photos for your projects.
Creative Commons Search
There are many sources of photos that are licensed under Creative Commons, and one of the easiest ways to search multiple sources at once is with the Creative Commons Search website
Just make sure the boxes for commercial use, and, if you nee it, the box that allows you to modify the image, are checked
You can search Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, and more from this single source...
Pixabay
Pixabay is a huge source of free images, and a lot of the are very high quality. You can find images for just about any topic you can think of.
Pexels
Pexels is another great source of beautiful images. They are an archive of photos from a number of different sources, an most of their images are fantastic quality
The Stock
This is a great place to search for images, because you can search several different locations from a single source. If you haven’t found what you’re looking for after searching th other sites, this one might be a good option
Morgue File
MorgueFile is one of the oldest free stock photo sites. They have over 350,000 photos, so there’s a good chance you ca find what you’re looking for here.
What if you search all the free sites and can’t find what yo need? Then it’s time to look for a paid image.