The internet is a very visual medium. If you write for online audiences, you know how important it is to include relevant photos or other images with your written words to fully convey your ideas to the reader. If you are publishing your writing on your own website or blog, you are responsible for all of your own content, including the images. As a writer, you are probably more interested in writing new content than in producing images to go along with it, and if you don’t have much of a budget (or any budget) for your website, it may not be possible to purchase photos or hire a photographer for your projects. Luckily there are quite a few resources available where you can find high quality, free, royalty-free photos to use alongside your blog posts, articles, and stories.
For my articles, I do try to take my own photos to go with my writing whenever possible. Lately I’ve been writing a lot of gardening articles for Dengarden, so there are a lot of places where it makes the most sense to use pictures of my own garden and plants. I’m not the best photographer, and I just use my iPhone, but it works well enough for those kinds of articles. When I don’t have my own photographs to use, however, the first place I turn to is Pixabay.
Pixabay has tons of high quality royalty-free photographs available for free. The photos on this site are free to use for any project, including commercial projects. You don’t even have to give the photographers credit, according to the Pixabay licensing agreement, though I would recommend crediting the photographers whenever possible. It’s just the right thing to do.
Another free photography website is Pexels. I don’t use this one as often as Pixabay, but it has a similar licensing agreement, so you can safely use any photo you download there for your creative projects.
Sometimes for more academic subjects, I can’t find what I need on those free photos websites, so I use Wikimedia Commons instead. When you use Wikimedia Commons, you have to be sure to check the licensing terms for each individual image, as many require attribution or aren’t allowed to be used in certain ways.
There are a few other websites I occasionally check for free images, though the ones I’ve mentioned seem to be the best that I’ve discovered so far. Do you have a favorite place to get images for your articles or blog posts? Let me know in the comments!