Great Sites for Free Stock Photos and Image Tools

It always seems to be a struggle to find those great looking stock images to use on your blog posts or on your websites.

I wanted to put together a list of a few sites and tools I use all the time for both instances. These are great resources and all free to use.

Although many people do this, going to Google and choosing an image and posting it on website is not allowed. Some of those images are copyrighted, property of the owner or not free to use with out permission.

A creative commons license is a public copyright licenses that allows for free private or commercial use. In other words the author is sharing the image and allowing you to build on the work they have created.

With that out of the way, I'll share some of my favorite sites that provide free creative commons license. These sites are in no particular order and are all worth checking out.

1) PixaBay

Great website that I usually start at when I am searching for my images. The sites claims to offer 1.4 million free to use images and usually has what I need. The images are amazing quality and offer a variety of download sizes up to 6608 x 4408px. That sizes are huge and will work well even for large print banners.

2) LibreStock

This site is not quite as thorough as PixaBay but is still a great resource. It scans many other free photo sites with its results. I have found it to provide results when I was unable to find the correct image on Pixabay. The site has very high quality images but most do not have the option to download various sizes. With out the large sizes available you would want to use these photos more for online usage.

3) Pexels

I find I don't use this site as often as I should but that because I find great results with the two sites listed above. I do find that LibreStock pulls this site in its results quite a bit so that why I included it on the list. Like the others it has amazing images but without various download sizes available.

Image Tools:

1) Tinypng

I love this site! I make many websites and would not post an image on a website with out running it through this tool first. A main factor in SEO is image size because of the effect it has on page load speed. This tool, on average shrinks my images by about 80%, that is amazing and help s my websites so much. This tool offers a Photoshop plugin and a super easy drag n drop web interface. To me this website is a 10/10!

2) imgur

This is the best free image hosting site on the net and the choice or most Redditors. Upload an image and then post the created link on fourms and social networking sites. If you have every wondered how to post a banner on your steemit profile, this is how.

I hope these sites help you find great images for all your posting purposes. Let me know if you know other great websites that should be on this list.