Where to get free images for your website

The basis of visual perception of content are images. Very often site owners simply open a search engine, search for images and take the first liked images. However, this practice can be fraught with problems – because all images have their owner. There are a number of licenses for images. To determine which images can be used on your site, consider what licenses exist, and then understand where to take images for free use.

1. Public Domain – this license applies to images whose authors have declared them authorized for free use. Images under this license can safely use on your site.
2. Creative Commons – this license provides 6 types of use of the image. Images with this license can be used freely only by the author and only if they are marked as CC Attribution (abbreviated CC-BY) or CC Attribution-Share Alike (CC-BY-SA).
3. Royalty-Free – This license implies that the image must be purchased, but once purchased, it can be used an unlimited number of times. The license can be translated as “Purchase for Unlimited Use”.
4. Rights-Managed – This type of license involves limiting the number of times an image can be used after purchase. You have to pay separately for each use of the image.

Thus, it is advisable to use images with a Public Domain license on your site.

Where to get free images for the site

In fact, in the network there are many sites with free images, but first of all it is worth paying attention to serious projects with large image banks.

https://pixabay.com/ru/ is probably the best of the image banks that you can safely use. The front page of the site has the following message: “Pixabay is a vibrant community of creatives who share copyrights for images and videos. All content is released under a Pixabay license, making it safe to use without inviting permission or giving credit to the artist – even for commercial purposes.” That’s totally fine with us.

https://unsplash.com/ – the site states that it is: “An Internet source of freely usable images.” The site has a large selection of images, conveniently categorized.

https://burst.shopify.com/ – “Free stock photos for websites and commercial use” – Free stock photos for websites and commercial use. The site has a large number of quality stock photos.

https://www.pexels.com/ – “All photos and videos on Pexels can be downloaded and used for free” – All photos and videos on Pexels can be downloaded and used for free. There are many free photos and videos on the site.

https://imaggeo.egu.eu – The site is a geographic archive of images and videos from the European Union of Earth Sciences with a large selection of nature and landscape images. However, the site says, “All material in this database is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which means that Imaggeo content is owned by the individual creators and that they should always be credited when using it.” That is, when using images from the site, the owners must be cited.

https://ccsearch.creativecommons.org/ is a search engine for free images but with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, requiring attribution.