Best stock photo sites for your website

Choosing images for your website can be time-consuming and expensive. You have to browse free and premium stock photo libraries to find the right ones. And since you usually need several photos, you need to ensure consistency and style.

An alternative is to go with a personalized photoshoot which will always bring you higher-quality results. The problem is that not every business can afford to hire a photographer. Plus, you may need photos for temporary campaigns on a regular basis which will significantly increase your operational costs.

We get back to stock photos and stock photo libraries as a low-cost alternative. In this article, we have summarized the most popular free and paid stock photo sites. Use these resources to find high-resolution images for your website, social media, and campaigns.

Unsplash

Unsplash is one of the most popular stock photo libraries offering high-resolution images free of charge. Unsplash claims to have over 5 million images and 330 000 photographers contributing to their growing library.

Unsplash offers an interesting approach for businesses to promote their products and services by offering branded high-quality images. With that said, you can discover free photo collections created by Harley Davidson, MailChimp, Hyundai, and more.

Unsplash also offers a premium version called Unsplash+ where you can find even better stock photos. The price starts at $4/monthly if you go with the annual plan.

Pexels

Pexels is another free stock photo library founded in 2014 (currently owned by Canva) with a total number of 3.2 million images.

Apart from high-resolution photos, Pexels offers a free stock video library which can be very useful for quick and low-cost video production.

Another interesting feature of Pexels is curated challenges. Challenges are an interesting way for photographers to test their skills and earn extra.

Adobe Stock Photos

When it comes to photos, design, and creativity, Adobe is one of the first companies that comes to mind. Apart from its powerful software library, Adobe curates several creative projects, including Adobe Stock Photos.

Adobe Stock Photos offer royalty-free and premium stock photos and videos. While it is a premium resource, Adobe offers a 30-day trial period where you can download up to 10 photos from their collection. The premium plans start from $29.99/month which is limited to 10 assets including 1 HD video download.

Getty Images

Probably the most famous stock photo library in the world, Getty Images offers photos, videos, and music assets. The library of Getty Images contains over 477 million assets which will satisfy the most demanding creative or web developer.

The downside of Getty Images is the pricing where you will need to spend starting from $100 for a single image (still cheaper than organizing a photo session).

Openverse

Openverse is a project curated by WordPress containing 700 million assets, including photos, videos, and music.

In essence, Openverse is an open-source search engine that searches for content under a Creative Commons license from dozens of sources.

The downside of Openverse (despite the number of assets) is the quality that often suffers. Nevertheless, it is a fast-growing project that you may want to check.

Other stock photo resources

While there are more stock photo resources available, we will not shortlist all of them.

Among the popular ones, we can name Shutterstock, Depositphotos, iStock, and Pixabay. These resources mainly contain high-quality images available under a subscription plan or one-time fee.

AI-generated photos

With AI (artificial intelligence) taking the market by storm, it is worth mentioning some of the ways how you can use it for your website to substitute traditional stock photo libraries.

One of the well-known and high-quality resources for generating AI artwork and photos is Midjourney. Midjourney is a San Francisco-based company that allows users to generate images using natural language descriptions (called “prompts”).

Some other alternatives to Midjourney are OpenAI and DALL-E.

Since May 2023, there is a new way to work with AI-generated images while incorporating stock photos or premium photos. Adobe launched their own AI engine where users can easily manipulate existing photos and images to adjust them using Firefly Generative AI.

Afterwords

If creating a photo session for your business is not on the budget list, there are plenty of free stock photo websites available.

You can easily go with free stock photos or choose content from the premium source. In both cases, it will be faster and require less budget.

As an alternative, you can use AI-generated content which offers endless possibilities and get improved on a daily basis.

At the end, in the digital age, your website is the key to your business success or failure and deserves a high-quality content.