Where to Find Images For Your Blog – 5 Completely Free Sites

Adding images to your blog provides additional context to your writing. It also makes your posts more attractive and easier to read. And while there are trillions of images on the internet, most of them require special permissions to use them. Thankfully there are plenty of free images which don’t require attribution or permission. Here’s where to find images for your blog with 5 free sites which are truly free.

Pexels

At 3.2 million completely free images, Pexels might just be the biggest and best place for where to find images for your blog.

It allows you to search by whatever terms you want, and sort the results by color, orientation, and size.

While all of these sorting options are fine, really the strength of this site is the size of its database. With so many millions of images and hundreds of thousands getting added every month, this just might be your one stop shop to find the image you’re looking for.

A specific feature which I do like that I haven’t found on other sites is the ability to set custom dimensions to download the image at.

So while most sites let you download full sized, medium, small, etc. versions of the image, on Pexels lets you specify the width you want from the start. This can save you some time from having to resize it on your end later.

One more very important pro for Pexels is that it even has a decent collection of completely free videos. Simply search for your topic and select “videos” and you’ll find dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of videos related to the search.

Unsplash

Unsplash is no slouch with 2 million free images in its database.

With another huge database, Unsplash is a very close second.

There’s no video on Unsplash, but I won’t hold it against it as again we’re looking for where to find images for your blog.

But given the size of its image database, odds are you’ll easily find what you’re looking for if this is the first site you go to.

One area where Unsplash comes out slightly ahead of Pexels is in the details of its photos. While both give you the camera make and model, focal length, aperture, and ISO of every photo (when the photographer shares it), Unsplash even includes the shutterspeed.

Admittedly 99% of the people who use these sites are just folks looking for where to find images for their blogs and don’t care about these.

But if you do, well, there you go.

Pixabay

Pixabay is a very solid third option with another huge database. I’m splitting hairs here, but the interface of the site isn’t quite as nice as Pexels or Unsplash. Unlike those options, they also feature premium images above the free options when you do a search which defeats the purpose.

That said, they give you all of the specific photo information, and even have video results, as well. If you can’t find the video you want on Pexels, try Pixabay.

Pixabay also has a dedicated illustrations search section with a nice collection of illustrations. As someone who likes illustrations and clip art as an alternative to photos occasionally, this site is a great option.

FreeImages

Formerly stock.xchng where incidentally I used to get all of my free images from, FreeImages has a very sizable database of… you guessed it, free images.

There’s no dedicated illustration search here, and no videos to speak of, but again, not a bad collection of images.

I’m not a fan of the interface here as clicking on an image brings up a new page you have to navigate.

Conversely, Pexels allows you to download the image while staying on the search page. It’s a little thing, but if you’re looking to download multiple images, FreeImages isn’t the most efficient.

Like Pixabay, they also push premium images above the free section which is a bit annoying.

Assuming there are results for your searches on Pexels and Unsplash, you’ll rarely see premium images promoted from a premium site.

Stockvault

If by some chance you didn’t find what you need from the last four and still need a site for where to find images for your blog, Stockvault is a solid option.

I’ve now given you about 10 million free images between all of these sites (including plenty of videos and illustrations).

Make sure to add alt text for every image and make sure to compress them when uploading like I detailed in how to auto compress images in WordPress, but go ahead and get to spicing up your posts with some relevant images!