List Of Best Free Stock Photos, Videos, Illustrations and Sounds Which Are Copyright Free To Use

I know, I know that I am putting it out here directly even before I started explaining you why I am doing this, but many of you came here just for the list, so scroll down to check out the list. So here’s the best sites for free stock photos, videos, illustrations, and sounds.

What is the most difficult thing for a small business? We feel, it is ‘Everything’. Promotion and Marketing activities is one of them. We know that with surety, because we have worked with many small businesses. Free resources for business helps with the much needed boost for their online marketing activities and promotion. So, I thought, why not build a list of resources that will actually help! I came up with the thought that there are some expensive stock photo sites which are not within the reach of majority of the people.

Small business owners have passion but passion doesn’t earn money unless it is converted into a product or service. The hurdle to this passion is usually the lack of funding, customer base or auxillary components that aid the business. We like to provide the auxillary component of marketing services to the small scale businesses who are on their own or have very limited budget to grow exponentially like big businesses.

This post is a conscious effort to help those small businesses, be it selling vegetables online or to sell motivational classes online to be a big business. The resources listed here will have their own licenses, so please make sure to check that before using any of the resources from the listed sites.

About Copyright

We will give a brief insight about the copyrights and licensing terms for your ease:

CC0 : Files under CC0 are in public domain which allows users to use, reuse, remix, modify, adapt or used in any of your project in any medium or  format without any conditions. This license allows for commercial use.

CC BY : CC BY license allows the above mentioned things but with the condition mentioned by the author who created that files or whoever has the ownership. In this type of licensing, it is usually the owner asks for attribution to their work mentioned with the product. This license allows for commercial use with conditions mentioned by the author.

CC BY-SA: This license has the feature of CC BY license type but with two conditions. This license allows for commercial use with the conditions that the author must be credited with the work you are going to use and the adaptations that you may have created should also be given credit or attributed  to the author.

CC BY-NC: Files/ documents or any work with this license cannot be used for commercial purposes and the author should be given the credit for the work whenever you use it. You can use these files for personal use with appropriate credits/attribution mentioned by the author.

CC BY-NC-SA: Works with this license comprises of the above conditions of CC BY-NC with an added condition which states that the adaptations should be attributed to the author with similar terms.

CC BY -ND: This license allows for commercial use with the condition that the work should be used as is with no modifications or adaptations and the author should be given credits for the work that you have used.

CC BY-NC-ND: This license allows only for non-commercial use. The credits must be given to the author of the work and no adaptations or derivatives of the work are allowed.

This is just a guide on copyrights and not the exact terms. Always refer to the terms mentioned individually to the files where you download it from. Here’s the link to more details on copyright: About CC Licenses

List Of Best Free Stock Photo Sites:

1. Pixabay

We suggest Pixabay to our audience a lot. We have used a lot of pictures from Pixabay for our projects. You can download pictures in some of the resolutions that doesn’t need signup and is sufficient for online use. Signup is required to download very high resolution pictures like print media. You can access more than 2.5 million high quality images from Pixabay. If you think that’s all, then Pixabay can pack quite a handful punch with other media files on our face! They have a huge library for illustrations, videos, vectors, music, and sound effects. When I recently checked, the stock library for other media file types is still growing, compared to the vast library of images that Pixabay has for downloading.

Check out pixabay.com

2. Stocksnap.io

Stocksnap offers good set of stock photos and you can select various categories based on your needs. They have done segmentation and classified images under specific categories, which will help you find out the right kind of images you are looking for.

If you are a photographer who own photos and want to let other people download your photos, then you can showcase it here. You can try uploading photos which are at least 1920 by 1280 pixels in size( for landscape orientation).

Check out stocksnap.io

3. Pexels.com

Pexels is one of the fast growing stock photo archives and they also keep various contests for creators. We are using a lot of Pexels image these days for a lot of projects. If you are feeling to start with a random image category, rather than searching for a specific image, then you  can directly check out their ‘Discovery‘ page. They have listed out amazing categories and photos. Pexels have gone one step ahead by providing polished stock video footages that you can use in your projects, even the commercial ones.

Check out pexels.com

4. Unsplash.com

Unsplash has some categorized contents. Definitely worth the content. One of the best part of Unsplash is their ‘Current events’ section where you can check out photos related to current world situations. Are you into 3D renderings? If yes, Unsplash has some good collection of 3D renders at your disposal.

To download stock photos from Unsplash, go to: unsplash.com

5. Reshot.com

Reshot is another gem in the jewllery box. Other than photos, Reshot offers 1500+ illustrations and 40,000+ icons. They also have various packs in their collection with photos which you can download in any format like PNG, SVG and vector formats. The massive collection at Reshot is designed by designers at Envato Elements.

To download stock photos from Reshot, go to: reshot.com

6. Picjumbo.com

Picjumbo is a beautiful project by Viktor Hanacek. This guy’s contribution is immense for bloggers, magazines and god knows who all! Picjumbo offers a section where they have the latest photos in the ‘New‘ section. Picjumbo has premium plans too, and guess what? You can download all the stock photos at picjumbo in All in one pack which has 4000+ stock photos!

To download stock photos from Picjumbo, go to picjumbo.com

7. Freestocks.org

A group of three photographers contribute to this site. Their collection is humble but growing. I guess most of the photos are near polish speaking regions and things around it.

To download stock photos from Freestocks, go to freestocks.org

8. Burst.Shopify.com

Burst is a stock image site of Shopify. They have amazing collection and you can actually use it on your websites directly if it is on Shopify. Shopify not only provides a good ecommerce experience, they are providing its customer and non-customers a stock photo site to use photos free of cost for their personal and commercial use.

To download stock photos from Burst, go to burst.shopify.com