How many times have you been in a situation where you needed a good image for a blog article, newsletter, online ad or generally in web design? Images are very important for the quality of content which you create. Therefore, when you do not have images of your own, it is best to look for them in online services that offer free images, illustrations, icons and other visual content.
A part of those services offers downloading images in a high resolution, and a part of them requires you to register as a user before downloading larger images. Either way, it is worth it, since the images are awesome and I recommend that you use them.
Gratisography
Free high resolution images for either personal or commercial use. New images are added each week. The author of images on this site is Ryan McGuire. They are organized in six main categories (Animals, Nature, Objects, People, Urban, Whimsical), and you can browse them via a search tool. By clicking on the image, you automatically download it to your computer.
Magdeleine
Neat images, but you will not find images from categories such as “work” or “computer”. Instead, you will find images of nature, people, animals, food, or technology. It is interesting that the images can be browsed by category, through a search engine or even by a dominant color. Interesting!
Pexels
Also a good images service. The search bar is just at the top, and most popular tags are located just underneath. The images are good and I am quite sure that everyone will find something useful there.
Picjumbo
An excellent selection of images organized in 16 categories. There is always something to find. The search is basic, but sufficient for finding images through keywords. High quality photos!
Pixabay
Free images, illustrations, vector graphics, and video. An exceptionally good search engine at the top of the service allows you to choose the media type, image orientation, category, size, and even the dominant color.
Images are divided into 20 categories and I am sure that you will find something that suits your needs here.
Raumrot
A good selection of free, high resolution images that you can use for either personal or commercial purposes. Images are organized into “sets”, but also in categories, which makes browsing and searching for an adequate image much easier.
A small minus here is that there is no clear search engine with which you can look for images, as you can instead download images just as a set, a pack of 20 or more images.
Unsplash
Free high resolution images with which you can do whatever you’d like, without restrictions. Images can be browsed by keywords, by using the search engine, or by browsing through collections. Each image also contains the name of the author, so you can even search by author. Great images!
Visualhunt
At the heart of this service is just what we need the most — search engine. Enter a keyword and select a color right from the start. After the initial results, you can narrow them down even further by additional filters.
Bonus resource:
Good Free Photos
A large public domain repository with tens of thousands of free stock photos. They classify photos by location and have pictures of places all around the world.
Do you happen to use some of the mentioned services? Is there a good one that I haven’t listed? Please, feel free to let us know and share your experiences.
This article was originally published at Avalon blog.