Finding good, relevant images is essential to running effective social media campaigns. Tweets with images attached consistently get more retweets and link clicks. Image posts tend to get more engagement than other content on Facebook, and sometimes link posts generate irrelevant or unattractive thumbnails that you need to replace. And your blog posts should have at least one image, to attract the attention of readers.
But creating them yourself is time-consuming, when it’s even possible, and paying for them can become extremely costly, especially given how many images you will likely end up needing, and given that many stock photography sites charge extra for commercial use.
So check out these five sites that I use to find royalty-free images for my social media campaigns.
Flickr
Flickr—the YouTube of photography—has the deepest and most diverse roster of photography, as its images are sourced from its millions of users who can upload whatever they want. But be careful when searching, because users are allowed to pick their own license terms. Not all photos are uploaded as royalty-free for commercial purposes, and some that are explicitly require attribution.
Pixabay
Pixabay offers “over 570,000 free photos, vectors and art illustrations” and even videos as well. Unlike Flickr, all of its images can be used for free for any purpose, with or without attribution. Compared to Flickr, its images are more similar to what you’d find at a commercial stock photography site, meaning there is less diversity of content but also less low-quality content.
Pexels
Pexles, a more recently launched site similar to Pixabay, offers “over 6,000 free stock photos” under the same license, making them “completely free to be used for any legal purpose.” While it doesn’t have the massive roster of images that Pixabay does, it serves as a useful supplement—I found the header photo for this blog post there, for instance.
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia—the umbrella organization that Wikipedia operates as part of—offers a database of over 30 million “freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.” So, like Flickr, it has a massive and diverse roster of images, but with the added bonus that all of them are free to be used for commercial purposes.
Google Images
Google Images is my go-to resources for finding royalty-free images for the simple reason that it contains all of the others. Just remember not to use the default search settings, which will mostly show you images that aren’t designated to be reused. Just go to Search tools -> More tools -> Usage rights and select “labeled for reuse,” and consider selecting a minimum resolution as well, and you should able to find anything you need.
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