Finding high-quality, royalty-free photos and videos for your website or social media can be a daunting task. It’s understandable to feel overwhelmed with all of the options that you see online. To make your search a lot easier, we’ve compiled the 20 best resources for royalty-free photos and videos. We have separated them into two sections for free resources and paid resources. All of these different and unique websites offer a wide range of options for all your visual needs. Whether you’re a blogger, marketer, or business owner, they will help you find the perfect visual content for your project.
10 Best Free Resources for Royalty-Free Photos and Videos
1. Unsplash
Unsplash is one of the most well-known websites that provide a large collection of high-quality photos without any copyright restrictions. The content in the website is community-driven which allows anyone to upload photos that can be shared with others. It is one of the best resources for finding royalty-free images for personal or commercial use in high-quality.
2. StockSnap
StockSnap has its own collection of royalty-free photos in high resolutions. These photos can be used for commercial or even personal projects. The website is easy to navigate and also has multiple categories to make it easier to find the right photos. The images are free to use and don’t require any attribution.
3. Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons is a project created by the Wikimedia Foundation which serves as a media file repository. It houses a large collection of free photos, illustrations, and videos. All of these are either already in the public domain or can be licensed under a free licence. When you use some of these photos, you will just need to provide proper attribution.
4. Freestock
Freestock provides users with free photos, icons, vectors, and videos. These are all curated by industry leaders and photography experts with a lot of professional experience. There are a lot of unique options and you can search for each content type specifically.
5. Pexels
Pexels boasts a large collection of high-quality royalty-free stock photos and videos. They have over 3 million images and videos that are copyright-free. They even have a unique feature which allows users to search for specific colours by providing the colour’s hex code.
6. Public Domain Archive
Public Domain Archive is a website which contains a lot of high-quality stock photos that are updated weekly. What makes the navigation more unique in this website is that the photos are displayed in a larger size in search results so that users can have a close look at the photos immediately.
7. Pixabay
Pixabay is a royalty-free stock media website which includes millions of photos and a large number of video footage and music. Media that is shared in Pixabay falls exclusively under the custom Pixabay licence. This licence generally allows the use of these photos and videos for free and for commercial or non-commercial use even without attribution.
8. Life of Pix
Life of Pix offers free high-resolution photos without any copyright restrictions. You can use these for both personal and commercial use. Creating an account in Life of Pix allows you to like photos and to view all of them in one page. They feature new photographs on the website every week.
9. Gratisography
Gratisography is one of the most unique resources for royalty-free photos and videos. Unlike typical websites, Gratisography offers more unique, artistic, and creative photos. It may only have over 700 stock photos, but these are the most unique stock photos that you can find online.
10. NASA’s Image and Video Library
NASA’s Image and Video Library is one of the best resources if you are looking to incorporate photos and videos of our planet or the heavenly bodies surrounding us. These photos are not copyright and can be used without permissions for information and educational purposes.
10 Best Paid Resources for Royalty-Free Photos and Videos
1. Shutterstock
Shutterstock is one of the most prominent resources of royalty-free photos and videos. They have over 400 million photos, illustrations, vectors and editorial images along with 4K and HD videos.
They offer all-in-one subscriptions which give a single user the access to photos, videos, music, and design tools. This plan starts at 29 USD per month for 10 credits and goes up to 199 USD per month for 750 credits.
2. Getty Images
Getty Images supplies editorial photos, stock photos, videos, and music for consumers and businesses. They have a library of over 477 million assets. It receives over 2.3 billion searches annually on its websites.
A single small image or low-res video costs 125 USD per download, a medium image costs 300 USD per download, and a large image or a 4K and HD video will cost 499 USD per download. They offer buying in packs of 5 and 10 which makes the individual price lower per download.
3. Alamy
Alamy is an online supplier of a large number of stock photos, videos, and other types of visual materials. They gather their content from independent photographers and agencies.
A 5 pack for personal use and for presentation or newsletters are priced at 83.99 USD, a 5 pack for a website is priced at 211.99 USD, and a 5 pack for a marketing package costs 599.99 USD. They also offer 10 packs and 25 packs.
4. Pond5
Pond5 is the largest marketplace for everything that you will need to create visual content. They have HD and 4K stock videos, photos, SFX, motion graphics, and music tracks. It has the largest collection of stock footage at more than 35 million clips.
You can avail of these individually, through credit packs, or through subscriptions. Individual purchases for photos start at 1 USD and videos start at 25 USD. The denominations of their credit packs are 250, 500, 1000, and 2500 USD. You can get their monthly subscription plan which includes videos and photos at 199 USD per month.
5. 123RF
123RF is a stock photo agency that sells royalty-free images and stock photos. They add 120,000 fresh content every day from 300,000 global contributors.
They offer subscription plans and credit packs for their customers. Their subscription plans start at 23 USD per month for 20 images and have plans for 50, 150, and 350 images. Their credit packs start at 30 USD for 30 credits and they also have payments for 90, 270, and 1000 credits.
6. Adobe Stock
Adobe Stock is a marketplace which contains millions of curated photos and graphics. This service is fully integrated with other Adobe services like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and more. Photos from Adobe Stock will make it easier for users to incorporate into other Adobe projects.
Adobe Stock offers credit packs and subscriptions. Credit packs start at 5 credits for 49.95 USD and there are also offerings for 16, 40, 80, and 150 credits. Subscriptions start at 29.99 USD per month for 10 standard assets and they also have higher subscriptions at 49.99 USD and 199.99 USD.
7. iStock
iStock provides millions of photos, videos, illustrations, clip art, and audio tracks for its customers. It is the original stock content website that is created by creatives for creatives.
You can pay for your content in iStock by availing credits. It starts at 33 USD for 3 credits and can go as high as 2400 USD for 300 credits.
8. Bigstock
Bigstock is a royalty-free, international microstock photography website. They add to their library every day and these photos and videos are from designers and photographers around the world.
They have a wide variety of subscription plans for both photos and videos. Their monthly plan for photo and video subscriptions start at 79 USD. You can also avail of credits which start at 35 USD for 10 image credits.
9. Dreamstime
Dreamstime is a royalty-free microstock website for photos and videos. It is currently distributing photos from 725,000 contributors to more than 35 million clients worldwide.
They offer credit packages and subscription plans for those that want to avail of their content. Credit packages start at 3 credits for around 15 USD and can go up to 550 credits. Monthly subscriptions start at around 26 USD for 5 photo downloads.
10. Depositphotos
Depositphotos is a website which brings authors and photographers of high-quality licensed photos, videos, graphics with prospective buyers. It has over 234 million files for clients in 192 countries.
There are two ways to avail of photos: on demand and subscription. On demand starts at 42 USD for 3 photos and can be as high as 299 USD for 100 photos. Subscriptions start at 9.99 USD for monthly payments and 99 USD for yearly payments.
Explaining Stock Photo Licences
- Royalty Free – Royalty images are not free. This licence allows a buyer to use a photo or video on different resources and media any number of times for a set price. The supplier still owns all the rights.
- Rights Managed – This licence is more restrictive. It defines how many times an image can be displayed, what size you can use, and what medium it will be used. This gives the buyer exclusive rights to the photo or video.
- Creative Commons – These are a series of licence types that allow photographers to easily licence their work. They let photographers define the level of access they want to give their photos. There are different types of CC licences to note. A CC0 is equivalent to the content being in the public domain. There are other CC licences like CC BY which require crediting the creator, title, and licence. Other licences like CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, and CC-BY-ND also do not allow works for commercial use or for the work to be modified.
- Public Domain – Photos and videos in the public domain do not have any licence agreements. Anyone can use these photos and videos without charge and without needing to credit the creator.
Conclusion
You won’t go wrong when you choose any of these 20 resources for royalty-free photos and videos. You can take a look at each of their libraries and see which stock photos and videos will work best for you and your company’s budget.
If finding royalty-free stock photos and videos still seems too daunting or expensive for you, you should consider hiring a professional video production company instead. Our team at fewStones has photo and video editors who have all the licences, equipment, and software to create the best photos and videos for your business.
You can get a free instant quote on all of our photography and video production services by clicking here.
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