There are two ways you can use images with your online business: to accompany individual products, and to add depth to your content (i.e. blog posts or announcements). With the former, you should ALWAYS be taking your own pictures using the best gear and skills possible. For the latter, though, using stock photos is just fine and RepricerExpress is here to tell you about the best sites where you can get them for free.
Kaboom Pics
When you’re looking for creative/abstract/modern/kinda-covers-everything images, then this is one of the top places you should be looking at. While they may not have the biggest selection of photos, what they lack in size they more than make for in simplicity.
Downloading a picture takes just one click, and you can sort through them in a variety of ways. Plus, you don’t need to sign up or log in to download.
- Category
- Search bar
- Hashtag
Pixabay
When it’s sheer numbers you’re after, head here. There are almost half a million free photos, vectors and all illustrations, and Pixabay lets you use them, without attribution, for anything you’d like. Here’s how you can search for photos:
- Category (at the bottom of the page)
- Search bar — further subdivided by media type, orientation, category and/or colour
Gratisography
Why do we love this one? Because the inventory is huge and the quality of pictures are high and consistent (they’re all taken by the site’s owner, Ryan McGuire).
While he keeps things free, there’s a cute option to buy him a coffee, which is a link that takes you to PayPal where you can donate to fund his art.
New pictures are added weekly and you can search either by ‘new pictures’, ‘all’ or one of six categories (animals, nature, objects, people, urban, whimsical). One thing to keep in mind: McGuire employs pagination on his site, so you can scroll and scroll and scroll without ever hitting the bottom.
Free Images
The only con we can think of to Free Images is you have to sign up to download pictures. But once you do, you’re privy to (as of publication) almost 400,000 images that are sorted into six main categories (arts and design, flowers and trees, outdoor activities, fashion and beauty, health and medical, home designs).
Photos are then further subdivided into free and premium, with about two dozen-ish categories comprising each. Or, you can use the search bar (top of page) or opt to see what falls under every letter of the alphabet (bottom of page).
Pexels
Most free stock photo sites have plenty of images to choose from, but what if your content has a fairly narrow focus? It can be pretty easy to run out of options or just not find a good enough selection. Luckily, Pexels uploads 10 images each day.
Search options include:
- Search bar
- Popular searches
- New Photos
- Popular photos
- Newly uploaded images (you browse through lines of three images at a time, with pagination giving infinite scroll).
Get Refe
We’ve preached plenty of times that all the images you use should be taken with a (semi) professional camera to ensure the best quality — but Get Refe has decided to ignore that rule by offering stock photos taken with mobile devices.
The main reason we’ve said this is because real cameras just give you that much more of a leg up, but there are plenty of talented photographers out there who are near-geniuses with their phones.
Check out this site if you want to start dabbling in your free time.
Foodies Feed
We’re not quite sure how we feel about this inclusion. On the one hand, they have amazing photos that will capture a certain audience (foodies and hungry people).
But on the other hand, aren’t there already enough pictures around of meals? Foodies Feed makes it hard to say no to one more shot of dessert.
Increase Sales With Intelligent Repricing Software
One of the biggest benefits of using stock photos to accompany your content is they grab the user’s attention a ton more. And you know what tends to happen with increased site traffic? Yup, your conversion rate tends to go up.
When that happens, be prepared with RepricerExpress so you can capitalise on your potentially increased sales. But in order to do that, you have to first sign up for your 15-day free trial first.
