Sourcing images for websites is a tricky and time consuming businesses.

The worse thing you can do is go to Google, find and image you like and download it and upload it to your website.  It is not rare that the copyright owner will find you and request payment for the use you ‘stole’ from them. Companies like Getty Images do this on a regular basis, and their fees are high. Also, you can’t even blame your web designer, as you are responsible fir your website, so if your web designer uses stock images for you, you better check he has the rights to do so.

The best thing, always, is commission your own images. Your own genuine images on your website convey a much better image of your business than stock images.

However, there are times when stock images are really useful

• To bring to life blog posts
• As background images

To name a couple.

So you came here looking for free stock images, and one of the best ways is to sign up for a free trial with a major stock image company.

My favourite is BigStock and you can sign up for a 14 day Free Trial with BigStock here

Once your free trail has expired, if you don’t want to continue then here are some sites that offer free stock images, I can’t personally warrant they are really copyright free, but I would hope so, but do double check.

• Minimography
• Unsplash
• FreeRange Stock
• Gratisography
• PicJumbo
• ImageBase
• MorgueFile
• Get Refe
• IM Free
• Picography
• Jay Matri
• Public Domain Archive
• Magdeleine
• Photopin
• Pixabay
• FocusFitness

I hope the list is helpful.

Please leave comments on the comment form if you discover any more or have issues with the above list.