Best Free Stock Image Sites for Startups in 2025

November 2, 2020

Karl Hughes

4 min read

tools

TL;DR: The best free stock image sites for startups in 2025:

Unsplash – Easiest to search with optional attribution and massive high-quality library
Pexels – Excellent variety with contributor leaderboards encouraging quality submissions
Pixabay – Over 1.2 million community-generated images covering virtually every topic
Pikwizard – 100,000+ exclusive images, especially strong for people photography

These platforms offer Creative Commons Zero (CC0) or similar licenses allowing commercial use without attribution requirements, perfect for bootstrapped startups building content libraries.

It’s really hard to justify paying for stock images on your blog when your startup is just getting off the ground.

While large companies may justify an in-house designer, custom photography, or very specific high-quality photos from paid sites, it’s hard to spend that kind of money when you’re just starting out. That said, you can probably make it a lot further than you think with one of the free options for stock photos I’ve listed here.

The Importance of Having Startup Images in Your Blog Posts

But first, why should you have images in your blog posts at all? Isn’t the focus primarily on the writing?

Yes, you should spend most of your time writing great content for your blog and promoting that content, but images are important too. For example:

They help break up long spans of text and give readers a break.
Startup images are great for SEO (especially if they’re unique).
Commercial stock images can illustrate or summarize your point.

Unfortunately, stock images can be bland and expensive. In this post, I’ve collected some of my favorite sources of free stock imagery. These sites are great for startups that want to add high-quality images to their blog posts but don’t have a huge budget to do so.

How I Create and Download Free Images for My Blog

As an example of how you can use some of the tools below, I created this video showing how I create unique lead images for my blog. Unsplash and Bannersnack are free, so in just five minutes, you can make eye-catching, original images that make your blog posts stand out on social media!

This workflow works for me, but Unsplash and Bannersnack aren’t the only startup image resources around.

Free Stock Images for Your Startup’s Blog

Unsplash – My personal go-to for stock images because it’s effortless to search and use. Attribution is also optional.

Moose – Free pictures to download that are designed to work together.

Pexels – Lots of great photos with an interesting leaderboard for contributors.

AllTheFreeStock – Get all the free stock images, videos, music, and icons under the Creative Commons Zero license.

Burst by Shopify – Their collections offer nice groupings of photos for specific use cases.

Death to Stock Newsletter – Subscribe to get free stock photos emailed to you every day.

EveryPixel – Uses artificial intelligence to index and search 50+ stock image providers for the best match.

Flickr Creative Commons – Creative Commons is a non-profit that offers an alternative to full copyright. There are different levels of CC licenses on Flickr.

FoodieFactor – FoodieFactor is a collection of 1200 of the best free food and drink stock photos currently available on the internet.

Foodiesfeed – Natural-looking food photos that are free to download or use.

ISO Republic – ISO Republic provides free stock photos for creatives and has published over 3,000 CC0 licensed images since its inception.

LibreStock – Allows you to search multiple stock photo sites at once.

Negative Space – Beautiful, high-resolution free photos for personal or commercial projects.

New Old Stock – Vintage photos that no longer have copyright protection and are free to use.

Picjumbo – Thousands of free money stock photos with upgrade options to get even more with a premium membership.

Pikwizard – Over 100,000 completely free stock photos that don’t require any attribution. High-quality images of people that can’t be found on other free stock photo sites.

Pixabay – Over 1.2 million community-generated new stock images of just about everything you can imagine.

Rawpixel – Most free images to use on the website are exclusive, comprised of photography, vector art, and mockups.

Startup Stock Photos – Free photos for startups, bloggers, publishers, websites, designers, developers, and creators.

Stock Up – Search their collection of 20,000 free stock photos.

StockSnap.io – Hundreds of free, high-resolution images added weekly.

Stockified – The search isn’t great, but the free work images are pretty interesting.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are free stock images really free for commercial use?

Most free stock image sites offer Creative Commons Zero (CC0) licensing, which allows unlimited commercial use without attribution requirements. However, always verify the specific license for each image before use, as some platforms include images with varied licensing requiring attribution or restricting commercial use. Sites like Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay predominantly offer CC0-licensed images safe for commercial startup blogs.

What's the difference between CC0 and royalty-free images?

Creative Commons Zero (CC0) is the most permissive license, allowing use, modification, and distribution for any purpose without attribution or payment. Royalty-free means you pay once (or in the case of free stock sites, nothing) for unlimited use rather than paying per use. Most free stock photo sites offer both CC0 licensing and royalty-free terms, meaning completely free commercial use.

How can I make free stock photos unique to my brand?

Customize stock photos by adding text overlays with your article title or key message, applying brand-consistent color filters or adjustments, cropping images to focus on specific elements, combining multiple stock photos into collages, or adding your logo and brand elements. Tools like Creatopy, Canva, or Adobe Express make customization accessible even without design experience.

Which free stock image site has the best quality photos?

Unsplash is widely considered the highest-quality free stock photo platform, featuring curated submissions from professional photographers. Pexels and ISO Republic also maintain exceptionally high quality standards. Pixabay offers the largest collection but with more variable quality. For specialized needs, Pikwizard excels in people photography while FoodieFactor offers the best food imagery.

Do I need to provide attribution for free stock images?

Attribution requirements depend on the specific image license. Most major free stock photo sites like Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay offer CC0 licensing where attribution is optional (though appreciated by photographers). Always check the license for each image before use. Some platforms like Magdeleine and certain Flickr Creative Commons images require attribution for commercial use.

How do I optimize stock images for SEO?

Optimize stock images for SEO by renaming files with descriptive, keyword-rich names before uploading, writing detailed alt text that describes the image and includes relevant keywords naturally, compressing file sizes for faster page loading using tools like TinyPNG, using appropriate image dimensions for your layout, and when possible, customizing images to make them unique rather than using identical copies appearing across many websites.

Can I use free stock images on social media?

Yes, CC0-licensed images from platforms like Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay can be used freely on social media for both personal and business accounts. Customize images with text overlays, crop to platform-specific dimensions, and apply filters to create branded social content. Some platforms like Instagram particularly favor visually distinctive images, so customization helps content stand out.