You’ve written the perfect blog post. Every word you read just makes you want to read more. Now all it needs is a few pictures to make it pop. But when I get to this point, I can feel the wheels coming to a screeching halt. Finding the perfect pictures to go with the perfect blog post makes me want to pull my hair out.
Usually, what happens is that the pictures I find have unclear usage rights, are of poor quality, or aren’t appropriate. There are times I have spent more time looking for the pictures than writing the post. True, I could pay for good stock photography but if you’re making 20 blog posts a month with two pictures each that can add up quickly.
Thankfully, there are some sites where you can find good photos with easy usage rights. Here are some of my go-to sites for free-for-commercial-use images. In these 7 sites, you can millions of free-for-commercial-use pictures. Hopefully you can find that one in a million shot for your post.
Wikipedia Commons houses the picture files for Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia. It currently houses over 28 million files and over 121,000 media collections. All of the photos on this site are uploaded under the Creative Commons license here.
Morguefile has been around since 1996, and has collected quite a lot of photos in its database. There are over 300,000 images on the site, taken by photographers from all around the world. If you’re not able to find images here, there are also links to many paid stock photo repositories. Questions about licensing can be found here.
Pixabay excels by having an intuitive search engine and over 500,000 images, vectors, and illustrations on the site. Like Morguefile, photographers from all around the world contribute to the cause. Each of the photos is free for commercial use under the site’s licensing options here.
Public Domain Pictures has over 115,000 pictures, separated into categories. Low-resolution images can be downloaded immediately, but if you want high-resolution photos you’ll need to create an account. The works on this site are classified as public domain here.
I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about Flickr. While it’s not solely for public domain pictures, free-for-commercial-use pictures are easily found by performing a search and taking a look on the left hand side where it says ‘license’. Scroll, and you should find what you need. Currently, there are at least 3.5 million pictures uploaded daily and more than 6 billion total images on the site.
It’s a very simple registration to get an account with RGB Stock, but it’s worth it. There are over 111,000 high-quality pictures on this site, each one placed into separate categories for easy searching. All of the pictures on the site are free to use for commercial purposes, as covered by this license.
The thousands of images on Freerangestock.com are available for both private and commercial use. The pictures themselves were taken by Freerangestock’s photographers or donated by commercial photographers for the site. The site’s license for the pictures is here.
719 pictures have been lovingly hand-picked by Markus Spiske and placed on this site. Each one of them is high-quality and chosen for its artistic value.
This is another site by Markus Spiske. This one stands out because it offers a long list of free-for- commercial-use sites, some of which are obscure.
Finding the perfect picture for your posts doesn’t always come easily, but it’s a necessity. These sites should put you well on the way to finding the best pictures for your posts.