20 Websites to Download Free Images to Reuse

On Jan 9, 2022

Most websites simply cannot thrive with some type of multimedia feature. Thankfully, the use of images helps provide a simple, effective way of transforming your blog and keeping it highly engaging.

The problem often lies in the type of image used for your everyday articles. Sometimes we insert a photo not because we are happy with it, but rather because we are settling for it. This is usually due to a lack of high quality sources that get buried among countless low quality competitors.

Luckily, there are some eye-popping gems focused on free images to reuse on your blog and social media account – all available for personal and commercial purposes. Rather than creating a numbered list, here are some of the best sources to find free images to reuse in no particular order.

The PhotoPin homepage greets you with a clean interface and a search bar to let you get right down to business. With a quick search you can quickly preview the desired image or download it directly from the results page. They also provide several nice filters as you search, including images for commercial use as well as the most recent additions. It has many sizes to choose from, with no login required!

Free Digital Photos grants plenty of options for finding free legal images. Not only are these appropriately categorized, but its advanced search feature allows you to filter images by newest, most popular, by dimension, by “any or all” inserted keywords, and even shows results with or without people in them. Small images are free and attribution is required.

This is a clean, easy-to-navigate source with thousands of free images online. In fact, sometimes I wonder how so many of those can possibly be free considering their top notch quality. You can filter by orientation, size, category, color, and transparency.

Dreamstime is better known for hosting high-resolution, paid photos, but they also provide an impressive list of free legal images readily available for download. Registering a free account grants you access to their library of thousands of free pictures based on common categories and subjects. You can also filter by commercial usage, editorial, and images with people present.

As the name suggests, Free Images is dedicated to bringing you over 380,000 free legal images for download — even for commercial use. Each picture shows an abundance of useful and technical details such as the type of camera used, its brightness level and the software it was rendered in. This allows you to make smarter decisions if you are very determined to obtain the highest quality available.

Getty Images is another popular website along the lines of Dreamstime. Instead of offering free images for download, however, they have developed an embedding feature that allows you to freely insert high-quality photos into your website. The only catch is that these images link back to their website, but that doesn’t sound like a bad thing considering the images’ high quality and overall reliability.

Wikimedia Commons is the media wing of Wikipedia and has thousands upon thousands of images under licenses from public domain, meaning free to use without restrictions, to various Creative Commons licenses. You can easily search for images by license type and quickly find something you can use on your site without worry.

Flickr offers an advanced search tool that least you narrow your search to only works licensed under Creative Commons licenses. You can easily filter results by those works available for making derivative works or for commerical use, just by ticking the relevant check boxes.

As with Flickr, Google Image Search offers an advance search tool that lets you filter results based on license type. Using the provided dropdown, you can easily select the image rights that you need and find relevant images to your query. However, where Flickr routinely provides high-resolution images, Google Images has results of all sizes.

With well over 400,000 files in its database, Morguefile is a free stock photo site where users upload and share their high quality photos. Although not as large as the other ones on this list, MorgueFile contains some very useful crop and rescale tools that eliminate much of the work while browsing. It also has great search tools to help you find images by size, date, and color.

Honorable Mentions:

Most image websites contain a similar set of options and filters, so we won’t spend much time describing the following sources in detail.

That being said, these are still worth noting due to their high quality content and overall trustworthiness:

You can either download or embed images directly into your website; attribution is generally required.

Another source for millions of photos and videos for your website.

Stock Snap has an interesting ‘Trending’ category which may help your website seem more relevant, all depending on your chosen niche. You may also browse through their existing categories.

This highly-trusted source contains over one million pictures and provides results from multiple sources, including Pixabay, Dreamstime, and more.

Unsplash is a favorite among many bloggers due to their unique high quality photos. In fact, the website claims that their images cannot be found anywhere else.

As the name implies, this website is primarily for old-fashioned images. Perfectly suitable for blogs and social media accounts dedicated to old-school content.

While some of the previous entries have a mixture of medium-to-high quality images, this one is known for focusing (primarily) on high quality entries and nothing less.

This source places a focus on business pictures for your Shopify store or small business, although general images can also be downloaded as well.

Lastly, Picography takes an interest in everyday objects (such as a coffee mug or a hat) and displays them from unique angles. Other general-purposes photos are also available for download.

This source mainly shows off business-themed photos, ideal for your commercial or business blog. The website needs work in the UI/browsing department, but you can definitely find many quality images for your business blog.

Final Thoughts

Although the above provide free images online for varying purposes, you should still consult with their terms of service and general usage agreement. For example, some images may require proper attribution and/or prior permission before download.

Don’t miss our previous content on optimizing your blog images for best results.

First published in 2020; updated in December 2021