These days, it seems we are all crunched for both time and money. We’re trying to do more with less and still continue to get ever improving results. In the course of navigating this challenge myself, I’ve compiled a list of “go to” design resources. There are the places I start when I need design assets that look like a million bucks but won’t break the bank.
This is the first in a series of my favorite time and money saving places to find free design assets for your projects.
Far and away, the most wanted design resources are stock photos. We’ve all got our own personal favorites like Unsplash, Pexels, StockSnap, Pixabay, and others.
If you work in PowerPoint, the Pexels add-in will save you a lot of time by letting access great photos right inside PowerPoint so you can skip the whole search, download and insert process.
Over the past couple of years, there has been a tidal wave of new sites offering fantastic collections of free stock photos. I’ve listed over 70 of them here and know that there are even more. Clearly, there are far too many to even think about trying to keep up with. (What a great problem to have, right?!)
EveryPixel
Which is why I always start my searches at EveryPixel. If you haven’t seen EveryPixel yet, you need to get over there and take a look. From there you can search across fifty of the top free and paid stock photo sites from a single place. This is a HUGE time-saver!
As if that wasn’t enough, you’ll also find some really useful filter options including:
- Free vs Paid
- Orientation: horizontal vs vertical
- Image type: photo, illustration or vector
- Color
- Free area: a unique filter for finding space within the image suitable for adding text
- Images that are isolated on a clean or transparent background
Depending on what you need, here are a few other options for searching stock photos that might also be helpful:
Freephotos.cc
On this site, you can search across multiple sites for free creative commons photos or browse the categories they’ve used to organize all their available photos.
FreePhotos.cc is a free resource where you can find creative commons photos for your website or print projects.
EveryStockPhoto
Check out everystockphoto, if you’d like your search to tap into images from NASA, Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.
Finda.Photo
This site only searches photos with CC0 “No Rights Reserved” licenses which are free to use for any project without requiring attribution.
Creative Commons
Creative Commons searches nearly 10 million items from places like Flickr, New York Public Library, Europeana and more.
https://ccsearch.creativecommons.org
What about you? Do you use any of these? Where does your quest for stock photos begin?
Mike Taylor 
Thanks Mike!
Also try http://librestock.com/
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Yes, another good one! Thanks, Veronica!
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Hi Mike,
Awesome post, really useful!
Have you heard about rawpixel? You’ve probably seen our images all over the place. We’re the leading stock photo contributor in the world. We’ve just launched our website http://www.rawpixel.com, where we give away the best free design resources out there. We’d be stoked if you could add us to this list. Looking forward to you joining our community of creatives.
BE INSPIRED. BE RAW.
/Jen
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