Free high-quality stock photos / images for your website or blog

This is an update to my old post written in 2009 with latest additions and deletions. Following are the best sites to find royalty-free, public domain, and creative commons licensed images to use on your website / blog / or even a commercial site.

1. Stock.Xchng:  This is the top site to find high quality images in high resolution. They don’t need a link back, but you can give if you want to thank the author of the image.

2. FreeDigitalPhotos.Net: This is an excellent site to find commercial-grade images, which can be downloaded for free. The biggest limitation is they offer small size of the image (400 px in width) for free and you need to pay if you need a bigger size image. You also need to give a link back to the site in the form of “author/site name.” But, they have excellent images and I have recently done a project using lot of images from this site. I needed all images in the width of 600 pixels. I achieved that by enlarging or adding white spaces on the left and right.

3. Pixabay: They have limited images, but really high quality ones in high resolutions. They are all from public domain, so no need of attribution.

4. Flickr:  It has millions of photos you can use for your site or blog with attribution.  Flickr photos are tagged with Creative Commons licenses.  Use the advanced search to find the image you need.  Don’t forget to select the license at the bottom.  Browse photos by license here.

5. StockPhotosForFree: They have 100,00 photos up to download and use for your work free.They don’t need attribution. Most of their images are pulled from free HQ videos.

6. MorgueFile: They have around 3-lac photos in high resolution, which you can use for your work without any attribution.

7. Public Domain Pictures: It has a huge number of quality pictures you can use without attribution. Very high resolution of the images are offered at a premium. If you used an image in your work and would like to donate to the author, you can do so by clicking on the coffee cup button on the right side of the image.

Know a better or bigger site than these? Do let me know and I will add to the list.