If you’re posting content anywhere on the internet, whether it’s a website, blog posts or even just on Instagram or Twitter, you’re bound to need some stock photos once in a while.

It may not be for every post but sometimes you need to get some information out there and need a photo to go alongside it but don’t have time to take your own. This is where stock photos come in.

I’m not talking about the cheesy ‘woman eats salad’ type photos but the realistic photos that genuinely look like you may have taken them yourself. For your brand, whether it’s a full-on brand or just your personal brand, you’ll want to keep your stock photos on brand so make sure you’re doing good searches to find photos that relate to your content.

But where do I find these images I hear you ask! I’ve collated a mixture of five free and not so free stock photo sites that will be sure to have something for you.

Unsplash

I use Unsplash a lot, for my own personal business but also in my day job. We also use iStock but a lot of the time Unsplash’s photos are more genuine and less stocky so if we can find what we want there then we don’t need to use iStock. Unsplash’s photos are free to use, although attribution is appreciated it’s not necessary, and there’s a wide variety to choose from. You can also create collections to save photos that are perfect for your brand for use in the future. The only problem with Unsplash is it’s searchability if you search ‘red wall’ you’re going to get photos tagged with both ‘red’ and ‘wall’ which isn’t always what you want.

Pexels

Similar to Unsplash, Pexels has a wide variety of not so stocky photos free to use with no attribution. It also has a similar search function which will search for both ‘red’ and ‘wall’ and has collections in which you can save photos for future downloading. From past experience, I’ve found Pexels to offer a smaller selection than Unsplash but that’s just for my purposes so I recommend trying both.

Etsy

If you’re wanting a whole range of the same type of photo, particularly if you’re a lifestyle blogger, then Etsy may have exactly what you need. Creators sell photo sets which contain 10-30 or even more photos of similar content and style which are perfect if you know exactly what you’re after and need variation for multiple social media streams or different blog posts in a series for example. Wee shout out to my friend Anjali who does exactly that over on her Etsy This Splendid Shambles if you want to get an idea of what I mean.

Death to Stock

While this is a subscription-based service like Adobe Stock and iStock you can also subscribe to their mailing list and get free stock photos to your mailbox every so often. These are random and may not be what you want but free stock photos are free stock photos. If you do subscribe you’ll have unlimited downloads on their entire library so depending on how often you need stock photos it may be right for you and is one of the cheaper options for stock photos.

Pixabay

Just like Unsplash and Pexels although Pixabay does have iStock ads all over the place so be careful. Although when you search for ‘red wall’ you get photos tagged with both ‘red’ and ‘wall’ not just the one. Pixabay is a bit more stocky than Unsplash or Pexels though, which may be what you’re after but take a look for yourself.

That’s only a few options, feel free to search the internet for more, and of course, if you have the dollar bills to spend you’ll always find something good on the likes of Adobe Stock and iStock. But try the free and cheaper sites first.

- Sophie

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5 free and not so free stock photo websites