How to Find Royalty Free Images for Your WordPress Blog Posts
Are you wondering where to find royalty-free images for your WordPress blog posts?
Royalty-free images can be used on your website without having to pay royalties to the copyright holder. This allows you to use high-quality images in your blog posts and make your site more visually appealing.
In this article, we will share some of our top sources to find royalty-free images for your WordPress blog posts.
Why Use Royalty-Free Images For Your WordPress Blog Posts?
Using images on your website can increase user engagement, improve SEO, and create brand awareness.
However, if you have just started a WordPress blog, then you may not have the budget to buy royalty images for your website. These are premium images that are protected by copyright, and their owner requires payment in order for you to use them.
By using royalty-free images on your website, you can save money, as most of them are free of cost, and make your website visually appealing at the same time.
These images can legally be used for any purpose, including blogs, online courses, social media, magazines, and so much more.
That being said, let’s take a look at some of the best sources to find royalty-free images for your WordPress blog posts.
1. FreeImages
FreeImages is the best place to find royalty-free images on the market. It is a popular website that comes with a library of millions of royalty-free stock photos, vectors, icons, and more.
With FreeImages, you can easily discover high-quality images that can be used for any purpose on your website, including newsletters, presentations, and more.
It is an easy-to-use platform where you can use the search bar or categories at the top to find the right images for your blog posts.
All you have to do is click on an image that you like, and it will open up on a new screen. Once you are there, simply click the ‘Free Download’ button to save the image on your computer.
Additionally, the website also offers other features like an image lightbox, image filtering, a variety of download options, the ability to comment on and rate images, and more.
All of this makes FreeImages a great place to start if you are new to using royalty-free images on your WordPress site.
2. Pixabay
Pixabay is a popular destination to find royalty-free, CC-0 licensed images. The website offers a large collection of images sorted into categories and tags.
It also has an advanced search feature to help you find the perfect images for your website in no time.
Pixabay has a library of over 2.7 million high-quality, royalty-free images, videos, and audio that can elevate your blog post content and make it more engaging for your users.
Plus, the platform offers a variety of download options, including different sizes and resolutions that you can use on your website.
3. Unsplash
Unsplash is a well-known website for downloading high-quality, royalty-free, CC-0 licensed, and public domain images.
It has a great search feature that allows you to find images matching certain themes like nature, office, work, and more.
The tool has a huge library, image lightbox, and image commenting feature and even boasts a huge community of photographers who contribute to the platform on a daily basis.
Plus, Unsplash also offers a Google Chrome extension, which shows a random image in the background when you open a new tab. You can then download that image on your computer.
4. Vecteezy
Vecteezy is a popular website that provides stock vectors, icons, and graphics for free and paid downloads.
It has over 40 million files available for download, is super easy to use, and even comes with flexible licensing options.
Vecteezy also has an online editor that allows you to edit the images without downloading any software.
Plus, the tool offers an API to integrate Vecteezy content into your own applications, making it easy to add royalty-free images to your WordPress website.
5. Public Domain Pictures
Public Domain Pictures is an amazing platform that has a large collection of royalty-free images and photographs.
You can easily find great images for your website by using the search feature or browsing through categories on the platform.
Public Domain Pictures also lets you filter your images based on size, orientation, and colors and even has flexible download options.
It is a great website for finding royalty-free images because the images are free to use for any purpose and do not require any attribution.
6. New Old Stock
New Old Stock is a great website that has a collection of beautifully curated vintage photographs that are now in the public domain. These images are interesting as they give you a look into the past.
It has an advanced search feature, a lightbox, flexible download options, and over 70,000 high-resolution vintage photos, including people, landscapes, architecture, and everyday life.
New Old Stock also provides historical context for many of its photos, including the date and location of the image.
7. Pickup Image
Pickup Image offers a large collection of royalty-free photographs, images, and clipart.
The platform has a large library, an easy-to-use search feature, image filtering, and also sorts all the photographs into categories and tags for easier browsing.
8. Public Domain Archive
Public Domain Archive is another website that has high-quality, royalty-free stock photos. The site offers a mix of modern and vintage photographs that you can browse using categories or the search feature.
Plus, the website allows you to comment on or rate an image, which can help other users discover relevant content.
9. SplitShire
SplitShire is a free stock photo website that has a collection of over 20,000 unique images.
You can browse the site using a tags filter or view images in mosaic view. It also has flexible downloading options and a lightbox feature.
10. LibreShot
LibreShot is a well-known website with over 1 million stock photos and videos covering a wide range of subjects, including people, landscapes, animals, and objects.
It is super easy to use, is completely free, and has advanced search options. Plus, LibreShot also has premium images that you can buy for your WordPress site.
11. Skitterphoto
Skitterphoto offers high-resolution, royalty-free photographs. All images on the website are licensed under the CC-0 public domain.
The site features works from their own photographers, so you will find less used and more unique photographs.
Additionally, Skitterphoto allows you to adapt and modify images for any purpose, giving you more freedom to create unique and original content.
12. StockSnap.io
StockSnap is a beautifully curated and easy-to-use website for royalty-free photographs and CC0-licensed images.
It has a library of over 2 million images and allows you to browse them using a search bar, categories, and tags.
StockSnap even has an API that allows you to integrate StockSnap content into your own applications.
13. Wikimedia Commons
A project of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Commons is a large library of images, audio, and video files that can be freely used.
You can browse through this website by media types such as images, photographs, drawings, and illustrations or by file types like audio, video, image, and more. Images can also be browsed based on their license.
A large number of images on Wikimedia Commons are in the public domain, which means you are free to use them without any attribution. However, some images may have a Creative Commons license requiring attribution. Make sure you check the license information below each image.
14. PDPics
PDPics is another platform that offers a large collection of public domain images. At first look, the site may look very basic, but it has photos neatly organized into categories and tags.
It has over 92,000 images, is free to use, has advanced search features, and is an open-source project, making it a great resource to find images for your WordPress blog posts.
Bonus: Optimize Images On Your WordPress Blog
Once you have found royalty-free images that you want to use, it is important to optimize them before adding the images to your website.
Optimization can help improve your overall website performance and speed, reduce bandwidth costs, and even improve your site’s SEO.
To optimize your images, you have to make sure that you have chosen the correct image type.
For example, if you are using an image with a lot of colors, then you should go with the JPEG file format. However, if your image has fewer colors, then PNG is the better option because it saves images in higher quality.
You can also optimize your images by compressing them into smaller files. You can use tools like Adobe Photoshop or Affinity Photo, as they come with built-in compression features.
You can also use popular WordPress compression plugins like Optimole to compress your images into smaller files.
For more information, see our beginner’s guide on how to easily optimize images for web performance without losing quality.
We hope this article helped you learn how to find royalty-free images for your WordPress blog posts. You may also want to check out our tutorial on how to create responsive image galleries in WordPress with Envira and our top picks for the best tools to create better images for your WordPress blog posts.
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