7 Best Stock Photos Sites for Your Social Media
When it comes to finding photos for your social media postings, things can get tricky with licensing fees, attributions to photographers, and even just finding what you need to showcase your post. Sometimes the easiest resource is a stock photo site – with thousands of images to choose from, you’re bound to find one that perfectly captures exactly what you’re looking for. There are dozens if not hundreds of stock photo sites out there, and it can be hard to find the right one for what you’re looking for.
Here are 7 stock photo resources that feature unique photos and a variety of options to take your social media postings to the next level.
Negative Space
Negative Space is a great resource as it offers up new free stock photos weekly. All of the photos included in their database are shared without copyright restrictions, which means that you’re free to use them in any way you see fit. With subjects varying from architecture to technology, their continuously growing assortment of images is one you’ll find yourself going back to over and over again. An excellent feature of Negative Space is the ability to filter the photos and sort by category, copy space position, and even colour. These allow you to narrow your field of images to the closest possible one to what you’re looking for.
Pexels
Pexels is a personal favourite resource of some of my marketing team and offers handpicked photos from a variety of image sources to ensure you’re getting the cream of the crop when it comes to stock photos. All of the photos that meet the high standards of Pexels are under the Creative Commons Zero license, meaning that they are free for personal and commercial use without any attribution requirement. Pexels also boasts an awesome search functionality that will unearth the perfect photo for your next project.
Picjumbo
Adding new photos daily, Picjumbo offers a wide selection of high-quality images to fit a wide array of topics. Run by an individual photographer, Viktor, this site features a wide variety of free images perfect for social media postings. While Viktor uploads these images for free use, there are also unique paid packages offered for bloggers, designers, and agencies as a way of supporting the site and photographer.
Freerange
Freerange offers a large selection of photos that come from both in-house photographers, as well as an ever increasing community of external contributors. They offer a huge assortment of photos that are also good quality images. All of the photos featured on their site are either digitally photographed on Canon DSLR cameras or a high-resolution Nikon scan of an original 35mm slide. This provides a unique resource of analogue photos as well as more current offerings, which can be used to fit a variety of social media needs. The photos are licensed under Equalicense which allows images to be used without attribution, however as with most of these sites “you cannot sell or redistribute the images and are unable to sell products that derive their primary value from the image” as per their website.
Hubspot
Hubspot provides a great source not only for stock photos but also a variety of other social media resources as well. According to Hubspot, they noticed a “shortage of high-quality free stock photos available to marketers and creatives” so they decided to create their own archive. Offering photos ranging in topic from business to holiday themes, their site has some great images and will only continue to grow in the future. You can also check out a variety of their other social media templates including a google drive social media calendar template that can help organize all of your social media postings in an easily readable and edited document for any members of your organization to use.
Unsplash
Unsplash is another copyright-free photography resource that we at Blissful & Co. love to use for our social media postings! This site has over 25,000 contributing photographers and generates an estimated 1 billion photo impressions per month. Unsplash also offers categories to choose from when searching through photos, as well as a standard search feature, and even allows you to create an account and follow certain photographers.
Haute Stock
Haute Stock is a paid resource for stock photos but provides styled stock photography for Women Entrepreneurs. The images on Haute Stock are both stylish and strategic with plenty of options for the fempreneur social media expert on the go. They offer a styled stock library, visual branding blog, and design tutorials to allow you to get the most out of the styled stock library photos they offer. Haute stock also offers some free photo options, but the paid program includes plenty more features.
Hopefully, you’re able to utilize these sites, or the dozens of other options for free stock photos to help improve your social media postings and take them to the next level. If a picture is worth a thousand words, that’s a lot more information than you can get from a 280 character tweet alone. Allow these photos to create a story for your postings and capture the attention of potential clients scrolling through their newsfeeds.
