Where can I find free photographs?
In this post I’m going to share some sites where you can download free photographs (known as ‘stock images’), and provide some tips and tricks for managing and editing your photos.
Whether you like it or not, you have to be creative when marketing your business. You need to find relevant images to jazz up your blog and social media posts, website content, ebooks and other marketing collateral, otherwise it will all look too wordy.
But where can you find a supply of FREE high resolution images that you are legally allowed to use?
Over the years I have curated a big collection of free stock image sites where, if you spend a little time, you can find some original images.
Avoid using the images everyone else uses – like those cringy ‘women leaping through the air’ pics that have been done to death.
Here’s are my go-to sites for free photographs.
7 of the best free photograph sites
Pexels
https://www.pexels.com/
Unsplash
https://unsplash.com/
Pixabay
https://pixabay.com/
Stocksnap
https://stocksnap.io/
Burst by Shopify
https://burst.shopify.com/
Envato Elements – you can search by colour!
https://elements.envato.com/photos
5 tips for working with free photographs
- Think about whether the photo needs to be landscape or portrait and use the filters on stock sites to get the right shaped photos
- Create a file called IMAGE LIBRARY and save your downloaded photos in one place.
- If it gets too messy, create sub folders to organise your photos (for example, WEBSITE IMAGES / BLOG POST IMAGES / SOCIAL MEDIA IMAGES etc).
- Rename your photos with the description of what it is. For example ‘Woman doing yoga in a studio’. This will help you down the line, and can help your SEO when uploading photos to your website.
- Can a photo say it better than words? Try removing a paragraph and replace it with an image. You can always add a caption underneath, or overlay some text using a tool like Canva (like this yoga photo I created in 30 seconds).
Some tricks you can use with your free photographs
To remove the background of a photo
https://www.remove.bg/
To edit, resize or save a photo as a different file type
https://pixlr.com/
To grab the colours of a photo
https://color.adobe.com/create/image
BONUS TIP!
Watch my video on how to use Adobe Color to extract colours from photographs and create simple colour palettes in Canva.
https://youtu.be/b7b6mQb_FUI
About the author
Jackie Salmon is an email marketing expert, Kajabi specialist and web designer based in the North East of England. She loves to support 'people who help people' and works with coaches, therapists and consultants, helping them to market their services and products online.
