How to find high resolution good quality images for free

High-quality images raise visual interest to your website. Web page with good quality photos gets better engagement when shared on social sites like Facebook or Twitter.

Free High Quality Image download

The web offers a huge number of  images just a Google search away. The photos that are licensed under the Creative Commons license or in the public domain can be used without any copyright issues.

The only obstacle is that Google may not always provide free content that is best. The free listings may lose out as their algorithms for image search prefer pages from premium stock photography websites. Listed below are some of the best websites, where you may find high-quality images for free if Google isn’t helping in your search for photos:

• google.com (LIFE) – The Google image website provides millions of historical photos from the LIFE library. You can add source: life to any photos in Google image and get them free for non-commercial and personal use.

• flickr.com (The British Library) – The National library of UK encourages re-use of over a million vintage images that they scanned and uploaded to Flickr that are now in the public domain.

• unsplash.com (Unsplash) – This is one of my favorite websites for downloading high-resolution photographs. 10 photos every 10 days can be obtained by subscribing to the email newsletter. All images are CC0 licensed i.e. they are in the free public domain and can be used in every way.

• pixabay.com (Pixabay) –Images on Pixabay are CC0 licensed and thus can be used anywhere. Like Flickr, there’s also an option to browse photographs by camera model.

• publicdomainarchive.com (Public Domain Archive) – This is an impressive online repository of public domain images that categorically organized. High quality photos are available, though the collection is limited at this time.

• picjubmo.com (Picjumbo) –Exceptionally high-quality photos are available here for commercial and personal use. The site owner himself shot the photos and all he need is proper attribution.

• commons.wikimedia.org (Wikimedia Commons) –21+ million images public domain or under some kind of free license are hosted by the site. The images are generally arranged categorically or can be obtained by searching the keywords.

• nos.twnsnd.co (New Old Stock) –Curated collection of vintage photographs from public archives are available here that are needed no copyright restrictions. This might be a good source for images if you want to create a twitter feed like @HistoricalPics.

• superfamous.com (Super Famous) – This is another great resource where you can  find high-res images for your design projects and websites. The images are Creative Commons licensed and need attribution.

• raumrot.com (Raumrot) – Beautiful, hi-res 300DPI stock photographs are featured on this site available for both personal and commercial use. The pictures come under Creative Commons and are sorted by subjects.

• freeimages.com (Stock Exchange) –One of the biggest repositories of free images and graphics that can be used for almost every purpose, however sign-in is needed to download the images. The site was previously hosted on the schx.hu domain, but now a part of Getty Images.

How to shield your own photos from getting copied

• gettyimages.com (Getty Images) –Looking for professional images for your website without the expensive license fee? Getty has something in store for you. Get pictures embedded from Getty Images for free on your website, though the embeds may carry few ads in future.

• imcreator.com (IM Free) – A curated collection of outstandingly high-quality images on every subject are available that are also free for commercial use. The images require attribution since most of them have been sourced from Flickr. 

• pdpics.com (Public Domain Photos) –Thousands of royalty free images are available on this website that can be used for both personal and commercial projects but with proper attribution. The images found are clicked by their own photographers, unlike other sites that merely curate contents.

• photopin.com (Photo Pin) – Photo Pin helps you easily find photos on Flickr, one of the biggest repositories of photographs on the web that comes under the Creative Commons license. The embed code is available so that you don’t have to host the photos on your own server.

• morguefile.com (Morgue File) –300,000+ free images are hosted by this site and can be used for free in both personal and commercial projects even without any attribution. A built-in cropping tool can be and from the image gallery and you can hotlink the images from your website.

• kaboompics.com (Kaboom Pics) – 550+ high-resolution photos (240-300dpi) that you can use for all kinds of projects included commercial ones has been uploaded by Karolina Grabowska, a web designer from Poland. The photos are arranged in categories or the search box can be used to quickly find images on various subjects.

• magdeleine.co (Magdeleine) – Free stock and hand-picked photos can be searched by mood,  subjects or even the dominant colour. Some of the images are even copyright free.

Avoiding common photos

In order to avoid the commonness of a great photo that might be perfect for your project go for a reverse image search using Google images that will help to find out the relative popularity of the image on the internet.