Find Free Blog Images at These 9 Places

Do you ever wonder where bloggers get their images from? Some bloggers take them, themselves but most of them go to free websites.

Below are the 9 best websites to get great, free pictures from:

1. Fotolia: This website is full of high quality photos … but you (normally) have to pay for them.However, every week Fotolia selects three photos that can be downloaded and used without paying anything: free royalty-free images of the week. Who knows, maybe they’ll have exactly what you were looking for?

2. Flickr: You’ve almost certainly come across Flickr before. To get images under the right copyright license, you can us specific groups like Free Use, which include only photographs whose owners declare no copyright and grant their works public domain status.

3. Freerange Stock: You can use these pictures freely, even without adding a proper attribution. However, you’re forbidden to redistribute, repackage, or claim ownership of the images. All the photos offered by FreeRange Stock are in JPG format, and they’re high-quality – they’re always reviewed before being posted. The website also offers free textures, useful in any graphic design project.

4. Google Image Search: Google Image Search lets you find images licensed under Creative Commons – but only if you first set your location to the US (if you’re not already in the US!) After that, you’ll see the license filter. You can use the customized search for looking for images under the following licenses: reuse, commercial reuse, reuse with modification and commercial reuse with modification.

5. Imagebase: ImageBase is a collection of images, mostly taken by David Niblack, a photographer kind enough to let people use his photos for free. The images downloaded from this website can be used for any purpose, both commercial and non-commercial, without attribution.

6. Openphoto: This is a sort of alternative photo sharing platform, whose primary audience are teachers, students, artists and developers. The website was founded in 1998 by Michael Jastremski, and has grown very large. You can browse through dozens of photo categories that range from animals and food to concepts and holidays. In general, all the photos here are distributed under the Creative Commons license, but the details of the copyright differ for different photos, so always check the exact usage terms before you use the photo on your blog.

7. Panoramio: This website can be of great use if you write a travel blog – all the photos are organized according to their location, as the platform is based on Google Maps. However, you can only use the photos after contacting the artist and asking for explicit permission. The best place to ask is the comment section below every photo or by using the private messaging feature available at Panoramio. The photos cannot be used for commercial and business purposes, however, unless the photographer agrees to it.

8. Stock.xchng: When you use this site, keep in mind that the first row of images (under “Premium results for X on iStockphoto.com” are not free and they come from iStockphoto. The images listed under “Results for X on SXC.hu” can be used for free, once you’ve registered, but before you go and paste an image onto your blog post, check the picture’s availability as some might require the author to be notified and credited when using the photo for any public work. You’ll find this information in the image info box.

9. Unrestricted Stock: The website provides not only stock photos, but also videos, fonts, buttons, icons, illustrations and vector resources. All the works available at Unrestrictedstock.com can be used free of charge in unrestricted terms of use, even for commercial purposes. I think that as far as its content is concerned, this website is pretty unique – it includes beautiful illustrations and hand-drawn icons.