Where to Find High-Quality Royalty-Free Images for Your Designs

If you always wanted something extra from your mobile accessories perhaps you should consider getting a personalised phone case. To create a unique design, however, you might need high-quality stock photos. But, stock photos can be costly, especially if you have a limited budget. This is where royalty-free images come in handy.

Royalty-free images are images that are sold for a one-time fee, or for absolutely free. There are plenty of royalty-free images websites on market but each of them comes with its own pros and cons. To save you the hassle of finding the best ones, below is a list of the 5 best websites to find high-quality royalty-free images for your designs.

Pexels

One of the best sites on market, Pexels offers you the best of free stock photos all in one place. They gather and curate photos from other places, and also add their own. It is the one-stop solution for all your image needs. You will find a huge collection to choose from. 

If you browse through their homepage, you will see Pexels has thousands of images that are royalty-free and allowed to use for commercial purposes. So with Pexels, you don’t have to worry when you’re searching for images to use in your design.

Besides, not only the images are royalty-free, they are actually free. Every one of them. Once you see an image you like, all you require to do is choose a size and click the download button. No signup or attribution is needed.

Unsplash

Being a photo-only directory for images, Unsplash has an interactive search bar that provides many related suggestions to assist you to locate exactly what you need.

You will find over 550,000 free high-res photos ready for download and use for both non-commercial and commercial use. Once you find an image you need, simply hit “download” and you are free to use it anywhere you like. If you want to credit the photographer you are welcome, but this is not required.

Life of Pix

It is not unusual to lose yourself while browsing through the vast collection of beautiful royalty-free pictures available on Life of Pix.

Founded by the Leeroy, an advertising company in Montreal, this site is a gold mine for free, public level photography.

Life of Pix is a great photographer community, all uploading their photos to be used for free. You can also visit their sister site Life of Vids for even more collections!

StockSnap

This site offers an extensive and excellent collection of free stock photography. They upload hundreds of quality images every week. 

StockSnap was created and operated by the good people at Snappa. Every single photo of this site is absolutely free to download and use.

Pixabay

Pixabay is another photo directory site that collects images from other image sources. They gather and curate the very best of stock photos and all images are allowed to use for commercial or personal use.

The site has a “camera search” feature, which lets users find images based on the camera model used to snap them. This is an excellent resource for both photographers and designers.

Pixabay offers you over 1.6 million royalty-free quality photos and video clips uploaded by its huge community. Once you find the photo you need, just select the file size and click download.