Photo by Filippo Diotalevi

How to find and use images free for commercial use has always been a struggle for the average Joe, especially with the introduction of the new laws for copyright.

If you have a blog, just like I do, or you are an aspiring designer or freelancer and if you don’t really know what  pictures you are allowed to use for your projects, than you are in the right place. I will give you here some options of websites that will show you how to find and use images free for commercial use. Build your projects without being worried that you will be sued by the rightful owner of the pictures that you used. Here is a selection of 19 websites that are more than enough to help you start any type of project you want.

Flickr

Flickr.com is one of the best places where you can find free pictures that you can use however you want (of course depending on the authors requests). You can search in a huge archive of photos by filtering for creative commons only. You can further filter the photos for commercial use and for those that allow modifications. Usually you will find thousands of photos for which you only need to provide credit to the author.

IMCreator

IM-Creator is a new way to create your website: choose a design, insert your content and publish it to the world – all in one simple, clear and seamless process. IM-Creator has also an image section, available for free use, under conditions of creative commons.

Startupstockphotos

A lot of photos that you can use anywhere you want. The only problem with this website is the fact that you cannot perform any search in order to find what you want so you have to look over all the pictures :-(

Imgmart

IMGMart.com is a supplier of royalty free stock images and stock film footage collections for the business and consumers, the creative professionals for advertising and graphic design, the media for print and online publishing and the corporate for in-house design, marketing and communication departments. Clicking on a picture gives you access to the image information, download link and the type of license it has.

Lifeofpix

This is a website created by LEEROY ADVERTISING AGENCY from Montreal. The website contains FREE high-resolution photos with no copyrights restrictions.
The images are there for personal & commercial use. New images added weekly!

Superfamous

Superfamous is the Los Angeles-based studio of Dutch interaction designer Folkert Gorter. The images here are under conditions of creative commons, this means that you can use them for your own purposes — including commercial use — as long as credit is provided.

Cupcake

All photos here on www.cupcake.nilssonlee.se are licensed under the Creative Commons license CC0, which means that you are free to use the images without any costs. You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking for permission.

Magdeleine

Wonderful artistic photos free for any use or under creative commons license.

Snapographic

You can use this high-resolution pictures on your personal and commercial projects for free. All pictures on the website snapographic.com were captured by Thomas Mühl and free of Copyright Restrictions (CC0 1.0 Universell).  A backlink is not necessary, but it would be nice.

Lockandstockphotos

In the spirit of keeping alive that great teaching of “Sharing is Caring”, the author  is releasing these photos under the Creative Commons License ShareAlike 4.0. If you use any of these photos, you have to add a link back to the main website, ajmontpetit.com.

Snapwiresnaps

A place where you can find free artistic images free for any type of use.

New Old Stock

A site that offers vintage photos from the public archives that are free of known copyright restrictions.

KaboomPics

KaboomPics is a collection of good quality photos offered for free to bloggers, website owners, small businesses, freelancers & social media ninjas. This simple website gives you an opportunity to browse through thousands of pictures without any payment even for commercial use.

Designerspics

Free Hi-Res photos for your personal & commercial use. Attribution not required!

Publicdomainarchive

The authors words about the website:  “I created PublicDomainArchive.com as a repository where I will be archiving the high quality public domain images that I find across the web. A hub for all high quality public domain images. I also wanted to create a website with a minimalist design that keeps the focus on the images.”

Beautiful images that are free for both personal and commercial use. Not all of them are free but there are a lot of free categories to choose from.

Compfight

Compfight is a image search engine that can find a lot of useful images that are free for commercial use. U can filter the results based on what type of license you need: Any license, Creative Commons and Commercial.

Jeshoots

You can copy, modify, distribute and use the images, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission and without paying attribution. On jéshoots you may find and share images free of copyrights. All pictures are published under Creative Commons public domain deed CC0.

Foodiesfeed

You can use the pictures in the free section anywhere you want, for both personal and commercial purpose, same thing is valid for edits (they are free to edit). The only thing that you are not allowed is selling or reselling these images. The pictures are taken with a Nikon D5200 with 35mm f/1.8G lens, resolution mostly 6000×4000.

Getrefe

Royalty-free, high-quality, natural looking photos of people interacting with technology.

Photopin

Search millions of Creative Commons photos and add them to your blog posts easily. Just search for any topic using the search box (e.g. “Kittens”, “Flowers”, etc.), preview the photo, and click “get photo” to download the photo as well as the proper attribution link.

Goodfreephotos

I have updated this post with this site as it has a large free stock photo collection, with thousands of public domain photos including landscapes, objects, animals, plants, textures, and many other stuff that you might need. All were taken by the author of the website. Currently over 5,000 photos and counting.