t are cleared to use for your blog posts or social media
content?
It’s a question with a
lot
of different answers and caveats. Nearly every image created in
the last 30 years is still protected by copyright—a protection that
gives virtually every author the exclusive right to use or
reproduce their work. But you can find a public domain photo, use a
Creative Commons image that might need attribution or even create
your own image from scratch.
We’ll explore all of these and then some in this post about free
image sources. A few things to know before we get started:
What is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the
sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal
tools.
There are various types of
Creative Commons
licenses that
range from allowing any type of use with no attribution to allowing
only certain uses and no changes.
What is public domain?
Works in the public domain are those whose copyrights have expired,
have been forfeited, or are inapplicable. Finding something on the
internet does not mean it is in the public domain.
These terms will come up often as we discuss free photo sources.
Read over the terms and conditions of each site you try so you know
exactly when and what type of attribution is required.
In this post, we’ll break down more than 50 different sources and
tools for visual content. We’ll cover the following (click on any
section to be taken to that area directly):
(One final note: Anywhere there’s a representative photo that
accompanies a tool or site, I’ve tried to leave it at the size it
downloaded to give you an idea of what you’ll be getting—click once
to get a better look at any photo.)
Searchable photo databases
If you want a photo or image on a specific topic, you’ll want a
site that’s searchable. Here are a few to check out. (To better
help you evaluate these sites, I performed the same search on each
using the word “coffee.”)
Dreamstime
offers a free section
that’s searchable and frequently updated. It requires you to create
a (free) account.
![dreamstime]( "转：53个免费照片网站汇总")
Free Digital
Photos houses a wealth of free
images—categorized and searchable—for business, personal or
educational use. They’re smaller sized, and larger versions are
available to purchase. Using the free images often requires a
credit to the photographer and the site like the one you see
below.
Image Credit: khunaspix via FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Free Images
is a large gallery of
more than 350,000 stock photos, searchable and categorized.
Downloading a photo does require a longer-than-most signup process
but the bigger selection might be worth it.
Free Range Stock
offers access to free
high-quality, high-resolution stock photos. A (free) registration
is required.
Free Photos
Bank has a
nice collection of free photos available for download without
login. They’re extensively categorized with a few different ways to
search, too.
ImageFree‘s
registered users can download both free and paid images to use in
corporate and personal projects. The free selection seems fairly
limited, though—my “coffee” search didn’t turn up a free photo I
could use.
IM Free
offers a curated
collection of free resources, all for commercial use. Search for a
keyword or browse through the stylishly crafted categories.
Morguefile
contains photographs
freely contributed by many artists to be used in creative projects
by visitors to the site. A short registration is required, and
morguefile asks that users credit the photographer when
possible.
Pixabay offers copyright-free, cost-free
images published under Creative Commons. You can copy, modify,
distribute and use the images, even for commercial purposes. No
registration is required.
Public Domain
Pictures is
a repository for a wide variety of free
public
domainimages uploaded by amateur photographers. A brief signup
is required. (Premium download is an option if you need larger
images.)
Stockvault
is a stock photo
sharing website where photographers, designers and students can
share their photographs, graphics and image files with each other
for free and use them for personal and non-commercial design work.
No registration is required.
Rgbstock
is a free stock image
site created by photographers and graphic artists. Registration
(required) is one-click and the pool of photos is pretty
deep.
Free-form photo collections
“Bloggers often look for specificity with the images they use on
posts when they could see similar results from simply choosing
high-quality photos,” says David Sherry of Death to The Stock
Photo.
His service and others in this category offer a more freewheeling
approach to images—no searching but lots of discovery.
Since there’s no search in this category, I’ve picked a
representative image for each service.
Ancestry
Images offers a free image archive of
historical prints, maps and artifact photos, like this print of a
New Zealand Maori Warrior from 1817.
BigFoto
is a royalty-free
photo gallery in which most of the photos have been contributed by
amateur photographers. No login is required. It’s organized mainly
by geographic area—for example, this photo is from the “Copenhagen”
collection.
Gratisography
is a collection of
free high-resolution images for personal or commercial use. New
photos are added weekly; simply click to download.
![Gratisography]( "转：53个免费照片网站汇总")
Death to The
Stock Photo offers free high-res lifestyle
photography sent to you monthly.
FreeMediaGoo
offers royalty-free,
cost-free media that can be used in print, film, TV, Internet or
any other type of media both for commercial and personal use.
There’s no login required but the inventory is slightly more
limited, organized into unique categories like “beach backgrounds”
and “concrete textures.”
18.) Hubspot
It’s not a photo source per se, but marketing platform
Hubspot often
offerspackages
of
free
photos in exchange
for your email address.
19.) iStock
iStock releases new a new batch of
free
stock images every
week. (Signup for a free membership—a slightly confusing process—is
required.)
Little Visuals
delivers 7 high-res
images to use anyway you want via email every 7 days. Subjects
range from industrial parts to idyllic landscapes.
New Old Stock
is a collection of
vintage photos from the public archives, free of known copyright
restrictions.
PicJumbo
offers a variety of
free photos for any kind of use—free of charge with no registration
required. Although there’s no search function, categories will help
you find your way.
Pickupimage
is a large collection
of free stock images mostly focusing on nature- and outdoor-related
scenes that can be copied, modified an distributed—even for
commercial purposes. No registration necessary! Since the pool
isn’t too broad this site didn’t pass the “coffee” search, but
here’s a sample of what you can find there.
Superfamous
houses the work of
Dutch interaction designer Folkert Gorter, whose photography is
available under the conditions of a
Creative Commons
Attribution 3.0 license. This means that you can use the work
for your own purposes — including commercial use — as long as
credit is provided.
Unsplash
offers 10 free (do
whatever you want) high-resolution photos every 10 days.
Wikimedia
Commons is
a database of 21,049,775 freely usable media files to which anyone
can contribute. The
images are
painstakingly organized but the classifications may not
be super clear if you’re not a big Wikipedia user (I’m not).
Photo search tools
These sites don’t offer free photos themselves but rather provide a
way to search easily through Flickr or public domain photos to more
quickly find a photo you can use.
Can We
Image searches and displays results
from Wikimedia Commons. All search results link directly to the
resource’s usage rights page.
Compfight
is a Flickr image
search engine that uses the Flickr API to locate images based on
your license needs.
Creative Commons
Search is a
sort of photo search engine clearinghouse that offers access to
search services provided by other organizations like Flickr and
Google.
For example, searching for “kittens” on Creative Commons Search and
selecting Google Images brings me here. Note that the search has
been set up with special parameters.
Foter is a Flickr-focused search tool
that helps quickly unearth photos and identify their
licenses.
Google
Advanced Image Search is a method of finding
free-to-use images through Google’s own search tools. Here’s a
quick
guide.
Every Stock
Photo is a
search engine for free photos. These come from many sources and are
license-specific. You can view a photo’s license by clicking on the
license icon, below and left of photos. Membership is free and
allows you to rate, tag, collect and comment on photos.
Image Finder
allows users to search
Creative Commons photos from Flickr with similar filters for
commercial/non-commercial and other categories.
PhotoPin‘s
interface allows users to search millions of Creative Commons
photos from Flickr.
StockPhotos.io
is a Creative
Commons-licensed professional free stock photos sharing community
of about 25,000 images. All photos displayed on this
Pinterest-esque site are allowed for commercial use with proper
credits to the authors.
TinEye
is a reverse image
search engine. It finds out where an image came from, how it is
being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or if there is
a higher resolution version.
Wylio is an all-in-one picture finder,
re-sizer and attribution builder for bloggers. Users can resize up
to 5 free images per month.
Create-your-own image tools
For options beyond readymade images, consider the many tools
available to help even the design-challenged among us create
attractive, original images.
is one we particularly turn to often for creating new images to
accompany Buffer’s blog posts. This tool allows users to search for
the best graphics, photos, and fonts (or upload your own) then use
Canva’s drag-and-drop tool to create a new design.
38.-51.)
For plenty more options for making original art, quote images and
even infographics, check out Buffer’s
14
Great Tools to Create Engaging Infographics and Images for your
Social Media Posts.
Embeddable media
52.) Getty Images
made
big news recently when it began to allow
non-commercial sites to embed some of its photos for free.
Downloading an image and uploading it to your website is still a
no-no—you’ve got to embed it.
As you’ll see below, an embed is slightly more intrusive than
simply adding a photo into your post – the embed keeps its own
frame, share buttons and branding. Still, for many blogs it’s an
option worth looking into.
Search for
embeddable
photos here. Read the instructions and then click on the
“Search images available to embed” link.
53.+)
It’s also worth noting that you can
embed Twitter,
Facebook
or
Google+
posts,
YouTube
videos and even
Slideshare
decks into your
blog post.
Pinterest boards are a little trickier to embed,
but it can be done. Here’s a
full guide from Ginny
Soskey and a look
at her adorable example board.
PinterestPin pets 
See On
Often, viewers can engage with embedded posts more deeply
than static content by following users, liking or commenting on
posts
Consider
replacing
screenshots with embedded posts so that users can engage
with your examples.
What free photo sites did I miss? What tools do you like the
most to find or create images? I’d love to keep the list growing in
the comments!
原文地址：
http://blog.bufferapp.com/free-image-sources-list
