Where to find non copyrighted pictures

You'd be hard-pressed to find a better image repository. Pixabay is another image repository that integrates images from other image hosting sites.

It attempts to gather the very best of free stock images for your own personal or commercial use. Pixabay also allows easy access to "camera search," which allows users to explore images based on the camera used to take them. This is a great resource for both beginners and professional photographers alike.

Wikimedia provides a truly stunning image repository, spanning everything from lush landscapes to historical events. Touting over 34 million freely usable pieces of media, including videos and sounds, Wikimedia is a necessity for graphic designers, photographers, and artists looking for free, high-quality images. Wikimedia is also part of a much larger organization dedicated to free images, education, and information.

They say something works well when you hardly notice it at all, and that's exactly what Burst provides. In the same vein as Unsplash, Burst not only provides a sleek interface to explore but a very wide selection of images and categories to choose from as well. Better yet, it provides both low- and high-quality images without copyright, depending on whether you're adding images to a website or using images for graphic design.

If you need a vast online repository of free high-quality images, bookmark Burst immediately. KaboomPics is a legitimately impressive undertaking. From the UI design to the vast reservoir or stellar images, you will find yourself combing through images you don't even need. If it was just about royalty-free images, KaboomPics' selection would already be top of the class.

But it also features both a color picker search engine and color palettes for images as well. That's just scratching the surface of what KaboomPics has to offer. From photoshoots to informative blog entries, it's one of the most impressive free stock image sites around. The team behind Freerange also operates another free site specializing in vintage images, called Vintage Stock Photos.

The content previously required payment, but now you can find thousands of dollars worth of quality vintage photos available at no extra charge.

Vintage Stock Photos is another site where you can lose serious time browsing through the catalog. The range of copyright-free images spans multiple decades and provides a fantastic snapshot of life through the ages. Are you looking for something a little more out there?

Do you need a quirky free high-resolution photo? Then Gratisography is the place for you. The site features a heap of "quirky… beautiful… arresting" copyright-free images that will enable you to put a unique spin on your next project. Libreshot is another handy source for slightly unusual free stock photography. Every shot on the site is the work of owner Martin Vorel.

Vorel uploads his brilliant photography from around the world to Libreshot, allowing you to use them for free. He only asks that if you do use one of his photos, consider adding a link to the site. To avoid ending up in court, you need to make sure all the pictures you use are royalty-free.

It just means you can use the picture for your projects once certain permissions are secured. For paid images, this usually means you pay a licensing fee as a one-off cost and can then use the image as many times as you want without giving attribution to the photographer or stock photo site. Free images are typically licensed with Creative Commons copyright licenses or are a part of the public domain.

Public domain images and images with a Creative Commons Zero CC0 license are free to download and use commercially without attributing the source. Copyright laws automatically give ownership and copyright protection to photographers around the world, whether or not the photographers actually want it. In the age of the internet, these laws both protect photographers and simplify the copyright process.

Can you imagine if every photographer had to apply for a copyright every time they took a picture? But many photographers choose to share their images for others to use. A Creative Commons license lets them legally control or revoke their rights of ownership.

Keep in mind that not all Creative Commons licenses are the same. Some Creative Commons licenses prohibit you from using the image for commercial purposes. Some require that you give attribution to the creator whenever you use the image the Creative Commons Attribution license, for example. Pictures with a CC0 license are truly free royalty-free images.

You can use them for any reason without permission, payment, or attribution. Before you use any royalty-free image with a Creative Commons license, double check it has the right license for your purpose, and always follow the conditions of the licence. Stock images are released into the wild with a Creative Commons license that determines how and where those images can be used and shared.

Royalties are ongoing payments made to owners and artists for the use of their works. Royalty-free images, however, are free from these kinds of restrictions. Some royalty-free images require a one-time purchase of a license to use the image, while other royalty-free images cost nothing to use.

Images in the public domain are completely free from copyright, so they are free to use. Photos whose copyright expired or never existed are part of the public domain. Although not technically the same thing, public domain images and images released under the Creative Commons Zero license achieve the same outcome — completely copyright and royalty free and free free. Below, we break down the best places to find completely free stock photos.

Unless stated otherwise, these stock photo databases offer images licensed with a CC0 license and are completely free to use without attribution to the creator. Unsplash offers a library of over 2 million completely free high-resolution images. Unsplash is a community effort — photographers from all over the world contribute their images to the library. Because of this, the images tend to veer on the side of artsy portraits and beautiful scenery, rather than more traditional stock photos.

Pros: All Unsplash images can be used for free without attribution, for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. They have a huge range of images and styles thanks to the variety of contributing photographers. You might be surprised. Cons: Due to the size of the library, it takes some time and scrolling to find the perfect picture.

Try changing up your keywords to narrow your search. Also, use their filters for the best results. As an added incentive, you can also hit a button to edit each image with Design Wizard, their sister graphic design tool.

Find professional images of people in all types of settings, including sets and series featuring the same actors across multiple photographs. These photos link to the Adobe Stock website and cost money to purchase. Burst , powered by Shopify, features thousands of professionally shot stock images you can use for any project or website.

Pros: Burst makes image searching easy with tags, categories, and collections that house all their photos. They constantly add new photos and tend to be quick to offer images that reflect trends and current events. This means their library is on the smaller side and offers less variety, but the photos are usually of a higher quality because of it.

Pros: Get weird with Gratisography. With hundreds of new images added each week, the growing collection of stock images on StockSnap. Pros: Completely free from copyright restrictions, StockSnap. This page tells users where they can find pictures to download. To learn how to copy them, see: How to copy text and images from a web page. The site is one of the best sites to locate free stock photos and contains thousands of free images that can be used by virtually anyone.

While many of the pictures are free, some of the images do require written permission first. Google Images - Searching on Google Images search is a great way to find lots of interesting pictures, but it used to be very time consuming to find pictures you could legally use on your site.

Thankfully, Google now has an option to search images by usage rights. In the image below, under the Search tools 1. Wikimedia Commons - Fantastic media repository that is part of the Wikipedia umbrella project, where users are free to use any of the site's photos, audio, videos, and other media freely.

Flickr British Library - A fantastic collection of scans from the British Library of over 11,, public domain pictures. MorgueFile - Another fantastic site to locate high-resolution digital stock photography.

The site offers thousands of free images, almost all which have no restrictions or agreements attached. Also, the site does not require a login to download the high-quality files. Unsplash - Fantastic site with over , high-resolution photos that can be used by anyone from a community of generous photographers.

Picjumbo - A great collection of totally free photos for commercial and personal use in a wide variety of categories.