Free Stock Photo Sites for your Social Media Images

Any social media manager or content marketer knows that one of the toughest parts of the job is finding the perfect image to accompany a post. We all know that images are one of the most important components for engagement, but unless you’re willing to pay significant costs for access to a database, trying to find great free social media images can be incredibly time-consuming.

To help you get rid of this headache, we’ve put together a list of 20 free stock photo sites that you can bookmark for easy reference whenever you’re having trouble getting the right picture.
Creative Commons Zero

Before sharing the list, it’s important to recognize what is meant with the different licensing and copyrights of images available. It can be hard to know if you are legally allowed to use or modify an image you find online for your personal or commercial uses, so the Creative Commons Zero license is especially valuable.

According to the Creative Commons website, the CC0 license “enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright- or database-protected content to waive those interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law.”

In other words, you are free to use that great sunset shot you found under the CC0 license for any purpose, including your next Instagram campaign. Here are the best free stock photo sites we found whose images fall under CC0.

Bonus: Download a free cheat sheet to quickly find the best image sizes for every social network and learn how you can use Hootsuite to easily add them to any post.

20 Free Sites for Awesome Social Media Images

1. Gratisography

Gratisography is one of the most interesting of the free stock photo sites due to the quirky style of photographer Ryan McGuire. All of the photos are high-resolution and royalty-free, ready for your use wherever you please. Sorted into the categories of animals, nature, objects, people, urban, and whimsical, there are new photos added weekly, which are also shared through McGuire’s Twitter and Facebook.

2. IM Free

IM Free offers not only free social media images, but is a “curated collection of free web design resources, all for commercial use.” The royalty free collections include templates, icons, button makers, along with classic free stock images organized by themes such as technology, education, nature, and many more.

3. Pixabay

Pixabay offers over 490,000 free images for both your personal and commercial use. These are great to use as social media images, because Pixabay’s collection includes not only photos, but illustrations and vector images. As all images on the site are royalty free and covered under Creative Commons CC0, they may be modified and used commercially and in printed format.

4. Picjumbo

With over 2,479,693 downloads since its 2013 launch, Picjumbo is a popular free resource for your social media images. Users can either click through the different categories of over 600 high resolution photos for free, or download a pack that includes all images as well as three Photoshop mockups, in exchange for a donation of $10 or more.

5. Unsplash

Unsplash offers ten new photos every ten days via an email subscription as well as simply on their website. All photos are licensed under Creative Commons Zero, “which means you can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free, including commercial purposes, without asking permission from or providing attribution to the photographer or Unsplash.” You can navigate the site by viewing the photos in their larger versions, but when browsing I usually find it easier to switch to the grid format.

6. Morguefile

The Morguefile was created in 1996, and offers photographs available free for the use in creative projects. The website does ask that photographers or artists are credited when using their free stock images as they aren’t in the public domain. As they emphasize altering their images when using them, this is a great resource for free social media images that can be used as backgrounds for text-based images such as quotes, store hours, etc. that you want to post to Instagram or Facebook.

7. Stockvault

Stockvault hosts over 35,000 royalty-free images, graphics, and designs from photographers, designers, and students around the world. As long as you stay on the “Free Stock Photos” rather than the “Premium Stock Photos” tab, you have access to a huge library of photos to use for your content and social media purposes.

8. Negative Space

Negative Space adds new free stock images every week, and all are listed under the Creative Commons Zero license. These free images are sortable by category, copy space, position, and color. You can also follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, for updates on new image additions.

9. Lock and Stock Photos

Lock and Stock Photos was started by AJ Montpetit who firmly believes in a “sharing is caring” model and after benefiting for a long time from other free stock images sites, decided to become a producer himself. All of his beautiful photos are released under the Creative Commons Zero license, so no attribution is required (but is of course always appreciated).

10. Kaboompics

KaboomPics offers a ton of great quality royalty free stock images that are available for use by personal users as well as commercial purposes. The thousands of free images are searchable by keyword, category, tags, or can be browsed.

11. FancyCrave

FancyCrave’s easy to navigate website releases two new images from professional photographers everyday. When looking for free social media images, the extra colorful and vibrant nature of FancyCrave’s photographs are especially eye-catching for sharing and engagement purposes.

12. StockSnap

When researching resources for free social media images, I was told by more than one socially-savvy person that StockSnap was their favorite site. The free images can be sorted by date added, trending, number of views, number of downloads, as well as through keyword searches.

13. Startup Stock Photos

Startup Stock Photos has a concept that is pretty self-explanatory, with free stock images for “startups, bloggers, publishers, websites, designers, developers, creators, and everyone else.” The photos are especially great as free social media images when you are sharing links to content such as a professional blog post, where the most fitting visual is of someone on a computer or in a casual business setting.

14. Splitshire

Web designer Daniel Nanescu created Splitshire to offer a collection of stunning, easy to browse, free stock images. The images are sorted into helpful categories such as “Abstract,” “Still Life,” and “Technology,” which allows for a pleasant browsing experience. Nanescu’s photos which previously lived “on a hard drive gathering dust” are now, for good reason, being used on websites like The Huffington Post, CNN, as well as numerous books and magazine covers.

15. Life of Pix

Life of Pix is a collection of free high-resolution stock images donated to the public domain by the Leeroy Advertising Agency in Montreal. With no copyright restrictions, the beautiful photos are free for personal and commercial use. If you need free social media images of the moving variety, their sister site Life of Vids offers royalty-free videos, clips, and loops for you to use to your heart’s content.

16. Pexels

The free stock images on Pexels are curated from sites such as Gratisography, Unsplash, and Little Visuals, in the attempt to simplify the image searching process. All of the photos on the site are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero, making it easy to know that you can use any of the photos for personal or commercial use. The collection currently includes over 3,800 high-resolution free stock photos, with at least 70 new ones added each and every week.

17. Jay Mantri

Jay Mantri’s photographs are nothing short of breathtaking, and the fact that he offers them as free stock photos is extremely generous. While beautiful to scroll through in their large form, if you are needing to quickly find an image for your content or social media posting, I suggest changing to the archive view for a condensed appearance.

18. ISO Republic

ISO Republic is a fairly new site, run by English designer and photographer Tom Eversley. The site’s mission is “to provide high-quality images to be used by designers, developers, bloggers, marketers and social media teams.” The categories these free social media images are sorted into, include architecture, nature, people, textures, urban, and everyone’s favorite, “various”.

19. New Old Stock

New Old Stock provide the ultimate “Throwback Thursday” content with their hundreds of vintage photos from the public archives. The photos are fascinating and would be a compelling addition to any social media campaign. Offering hundreds of royalty free stock photos, New Old Stock’s collection showcases a wide variety of situations and subjects, perfect for a number of social media posting opportunities.

20. Free Refe

We have used a number of the free stock photos from Free Refe for our purposes, due to their clarity, quality, and diverse subject matter. Although there is an emphasis on photos showing “real life,” the images are anything but mundane. As their website states, “using great imagery helps portray emotions, increase sales, and conversions,” the free photos here are a must-bookmark resource.

The quest for perfect free social media images can seem daunting at first, but with these free resources hopefully the task has been made as painless as possible. Share your favorite sites for free stock photos with us, and let us know if we’ve missed any

Brand Bot. Hey Who What and the ones worth using

In a 2015 report, eMarketer estimated that some 2 billion consumers across the globe would use messaging apps by 2019.

In some respects, the development of chatbots is mimicking the early days of iPhone apps, when brands developed limited-function apps just to get attention.

For categories that provide no services and have limited direct interactions with consumers, fitting chatbots into a marketing plan can be a challenge.

When the next anniversary or birthday rolls around, you don’t have to visit 1-800 Flowers’ website to make an order. You don’t even have to leave Facebook Messenger.

In April, the company became one of the first brands to take advantage of the fact that Facebook had opened up Messenger to branded bots–software that performs automated tasks. Since then, the bot has been a hit. Chris McCann, president of the flower and gift delivery company, told Digiday that 70% of people who use the bot are new customers. Those customers also skew younger than the brand’s average.

The bot has two basic functions: to take orders and connect consumers with a live company representative. Well, sort of. When this writer tried the bot in July, he was introduced to “Jason.” When asked, “Are you a real person?” the bot replied, “Apologies. There are no agents available at the moment. Try again later.”

Welcome to the early days of AI-fueled marketing. Though clunky now, many believe these bots will transform the way we interact with brands. How exactly remains to be seen. While it’s possible that for some brands bots will be a major portal for e-commerce, they instead might wind up being used mostly to streamline customer service and make it less painful.

Why Bots? Why Now?

Facebook’s $22 billion purchase of messaging app WhatsApp in 2014 might well signal the moment that the social media era gave way to the messaging era. Chalk (another) one up to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who recognized a concurrent trend: Younger users and consumers in foreign marketers were flocking to messaging apps.

Zuckerberg has said he believes that before a product reaches 1 billion users, it’s too soon to monetize it. “Messenger is just now approaching that mark, so that means it’s time to monetize,” said Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst with eMarketer.

In a 2015 report, eMarketer estimated that some 2 billion consumers across the globe would use messaging apps by 2019. The figure in 2015 was 1.4 billion, which was up 31.6% from the previous year.

“I believe that messaging is the next big platform. In terms of time spent, attention, retention–this is where it's happening,” said David Marcus, VP of messaging products at Facebook, in a 2015 interview with Wired UK. “And it's a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build it.”

Who’s Doing What
In early July, Facebook announced there were 11,000 bots on Messenger two months after opening the platform to developers. Soon after, Apple opened iMessage to developers. At the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of software engineering, showed how a group of people could use DoorDash to coordinate a lunch order.

But such activity isn’t new. Well before Facebook’s and Apple’s moves, some brands were experimenting with messaging-based bots. For instance, to promote “Insidious: Chapter 3,” Focus Features launched a bot on messaging platform Kik that purported to be Quinn Brenner, the movie’s main character.

Russell Ward, SVP of marketing and business development at Massively, which worked on that effort, told CMO.com that his agency has done a dozen or more similar campaigns, including one for “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows” that employed four chatbots all based on the main characters from the movie.

Such bots are following preordained responses. “It is scripted,” Ward said, “but we have the ability to be very dynamic in how we answer.” For the Ninja Turtles program, for instance, Ninja Turtle Mikey offered such quotes as, “Pizza, like revenge, is a dish best served cold.”

Though that may sound like a novelty, Ward said he has bet his agency’s future on messaging. “We think every business, every brand will have a messaging bot,” he said.

Still, not everyone is convinced that consumers will eventually follow brands on Messenger the way they do on Facebook. Michael Africk, CEO and founder of Inmoji, said he thinks bots will behave like apps in the sense that they’ll be independent of brands. For instance, Inmoji offers a bot that works within messaging platforms that lets users see which movies are playing and then buy a ticket.

“That’s an easy way to do it without having to leave the conversation,” he told CMO.com.

Entertainer Or Facilitator?
In some respects, the development of chatbots is mimicking the early days of iPhone apps, when brands developed limited-function apps just to get attention. There have been some silly bots already, including candy brand Trolli’s egg bot, which offers GIFs and random weirdness designed to entertain millennials.

As Microsoft discovered, that can be a risky approach, especially if consumers can help “train” a bot: In March, the company introduced and recalled its Twitter-based chatbot Tay after users taught it to utter offensive statements.

For categories that provide no services and have limited direct interactions with consumers, such as consumer packaged goods, fitting chatbots into a marketing plan can be a challenge. For example, Oreo’s Twitter feed includes Oreo animations and pitches for other products, but will fans be up for seeing those type of communications on Messenger given Mondelez’s recent deal with Facebook that includes using Messenger bots.  

Other segments are a better fit. Chatbots can facilitate quick sales service-oriented categories, including banking, airlines, and pizza delivery. That said, eMarketer’s Aho Williams said she doesn’t think Messenger will become an e-commerce portal the way WeChat is in China. She pointed out that China doesn’t have the legacy of phone- and e-mail-based customer service that’s common in the West.

“Although ecommerce will play a role in Messenger, Facebook is choosing to focus more of its attention on an area that many people dislike: customer service,” Aho Williams said. “It believes bots can perform some of these functions faster and with a more positive experience than traditional ways of doing customer service.”

Bumps On The Road
Indeed, many consumers would welcome the idea of having better access to customer service. A 2015 survey from Corvisa found that 26% of respondents said they canceled a service in the previous year because of a frustrating customer service experience. More than half of the respondents said they would hang up if they were on hold for six to 16 minutes.

According to Peter Sena, chief creative officer and founder of Digital Surgeons, artificial intelligence will be able to answer questions quicker and also route customers to live customer-service reps. “I see bots as being able to get us to humans faster,” he said, recalling a problem he had with his cable bill that took 15 minutes of phone time to address. “If I could just open their app, push a button to say, ‘Speak to a support rep and we’ll call in you in X time,’ or push a button to talk to a person–that to me is so much better than picking up the telephone.”

An app–rather than a bot–might be even more effective, some said. As developer Dan Grover noted in an April blog post, ordering a pizza over Microsoft’s bot framework took a total of 73 taps, while doing so via Pizza Hut’s app took a mere 16. Grover wrote that rather than move on to bots, brands should focus on making better apps.

The problem, however, is that it’s difficult to get consumers to download a branded app. By contrast, consumers probably have at least one messaging app on their phones already.

With the help of Facebook and Apple, brands will be looking to penetrate those apps and conversations. They’ll have a hard time, Inmoji’s Africk said.

“I don’t want to see–next to my mom, my brother, and my wife and kids–Starbucks in those conversations,” he said. “I don’t need to make a lifelong connection with the Starbucks bot.”

Ward disagreed. “We see all kinds of use cases,” he said. “Rather than driving people to download an app, having them chat with a bot makes a lot of sense.”  -

Brand Bot. Hey Who What and the ones worth using

In a 2015 report, eMarketer estimated that some 2 billion consumers across the globe would use messaging apps by 2019.

In some respects, the development of chatbots is mimicking the early days of iPhone apps, when brands developed limited-function apps just to get attention.

For categories that provide no services and have limited direct interactions with consumers, fitting chatbots into a marketing plan can be a challenge.

When the next anniversary or birthday rolls around, you don’t have to visit 1-800 Flowers’ website to make an order. You don’t even have to leave Facebook Messenger.

In April, the company became one of the first brands to take advantage of the fact that Facebook had opened up Messenger to branded bots–software that performs automated tasks. Since then, the bot has been a hit. Chris McCann, president of the flower and gift delivery company, told Digiday that 70% of people who use the bot are new customers. Those customers also skew younger than the brand’s average.

The bot has two basic functions: to take orders and connect consumers with a live company representative. Well, sort of. When this writer tried the bot in July, he was introduced to “Jason.” When asked, “Are you a real person?” the bot replied, “Apologies. There are no agents available at the moment. Try again later.”

Welcome to the early days of AI-fueled marketing. Though clunky now, many believe these bots will transform the way we interact with brands. How exactly remains to be seen. While it’s possible that for some brands bots will be a major portal for e-commerce, they instead might wind up being used mostly to streamline customer service and make it less painful.

Why Bots? Why Now?

Facebook’s $22 billion purchase of messaging app WhatsApp in 2014 might well signal the moment that the social media era gave way to the messaging era. Chalk (another) one up to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who recognized a concurrent trend: Younger users and consumers in foreign marketers were flocking to messaging apps.

Zuckerberg has said he believes that before a product reaches 1 billion users, it’s too soon to monetize it. “Messenger is just now approaching that mark, so that means it’s time to monetize,” said Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst with eMarketer.

In a 2015 report, eMarketer estimated that some 2 billion consumers across the globe would use messaging apps by 2019. The figure in 2015 was 1.4 billion, which was up 31.6% from the previous year.

“I believe that messaging is the next big platform. In terms of time spent, attention, retention–this is where it's happening,” said David Marcus, VP of messaging products at Facebook, in a 2015 interview with Wired UK. “And it's a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build it.”

Who’s Doing What
In early July, Facebook announced there were 11,000 bots on Messenger two months after opening the platform to developers. Soon after, Apple opened iMessage to developers. At the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of software engineering, showed how a group of people could use DoorDash to coordinate a lunch order.

But such activity isn’t new. Well before Facebook’s and Apple’s moves, some brands were experimenting with messaging-based bots. For instance, to promote “Insidious: Chapter 3,” Focus Features launched a bot on messaging platform Kik that purported to be Quinn Brenner, the movie’s main character.

Russell Ward, SVP of marketing and business development at Massively, which worked on that effort, told CMO.com that his agency has done a dozen or more similar campaigns, including one for “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows” that employed four chatbots all based on the main characters from the movie.

Such bots are following preordained responses. “It is scripted,” Ward said, “but we have the ability to be very dynamic in how we answer.” For the Ninja Turtles program, for instance, Ninja Turtle Mikey offered such quotes as, “Pizza, like revenge, is a dish best served cold.”

Though that may sound like a novelty, Ward said he has bet his agency’s future on messaging. “We think every business, every brand will have a messaging bot,” he said.

Still, not everyone is convinced that consumers will eventually follow brands on Messenger the way they do on Facebook. Michael Africk, CEO and founder of Inmoji, said he thinks bots will behave like apps in the sense that they’ll be independent of brands. For instance, Inmoji offers a bot that works within messaging platforms that lets users see which movies are playing and then buy a ticket.

“That’s an easy way to do it without having to leave the conversation,” he told CMO.com.

Entertainer Or Facilitator?
In some respects, the development of chatbots is mimicking the early days of iPhone apps, when brands developed limited-function apps just to get attention. There have been some silly bots already, including candy brand Trolli’s egg bot, which offers GIFs and random weirdness designed to entertain millennials.

As Microsoft discovered, that can be a risky approach, especially if consumers can help “train” a bot: In March, the company introduced and recalled its Twitter-based chatbot Tay after users taught it to utter offensive statements.

For categories that provide no services and have limited direct interactions with consumers, such as consumer packaged goods, fitting chatbots into a marketing plan can be a challenge. For example, Oreo’s Twitter feed includes Oreo animations and pitches for other products, but will fans be up for seeing those type of communications on Messenger given Mondelez’s recent deal with Facebook that includes using Messenger bots.  

Other segments are a better fit. Chatbots can facilitate quick sales service-oriented categories, including banking, airlines, and pizza delivery. That said, eMarketer’s Aho Williams said she doesn’t think Messenger will become an e-commerce portal the way WeChat is in China. She pointed out that China doesn’t have the legacy of phone- and e-mail-based customer service that’s common in the West.

“Although ecommerce will play a role in Messenger, Facebook is choosing to focus more of its attention on an area that many people dislike: customer service,” Aho Williams said. “It believes bots can perform some of these functions faster and with a more positive experience than traditional ways of doing customer service.”

Bumps On The Road
Indeed, many consumers would welcome the idea of having better access to customer service. A 2015 survey from Corvisa found that 26% of respondents said they canceled a service in the previous year because of a frustrating customer service experience. More than half of the respondents said they would hang up if they were on hold for six to 16 minutes.

According to Peter Sena, chief creative officer and founder of Digital Surgeons, artificial intelligence will be able to answer questions quicker and also route customers to live customer-service reps. “I see bots as being able to get us to humans faster,” he said, recalling a problem he had with his cable bill that took 15 minutes of phone time to address. “If I could just open their app, push a button to say, ‘Speak to a support rep and we’ll call in you in X time,’ or push a button to talk to a person–that to me is so much better than picking up the telephone.”

An app–rather than a bot–might be even more effective, some said. As developer Dan Grover noted in an April blog post, ordering a pizza over Microsoft’s bot framework took a total of 73 taps, while doing so via Pizza Hut’s app took a mere 16. Grover wrote that rather than move on to bots, brands should focus on making better apps.

The problem, however, is that it’s difficult to get consumers to download a branded app. By contrast, consumers probably have at least one messaging app on their phones already.

With the help of Facebook and Apple, brands will be looking to penetrate those apps and conversations. They’ll have a hard time, Inmoji’s Africk said.

“I don’t want to see–next to my mom, my brother, and my wife and kids–Starbucks in those conversations,” he said. “I don’t need to make a lifelong connection with the Starbucks bot.”

Ward disagreed. “We see all kinds of use cases,” he said. “Rather than driving people to download an app, having them chat with a bot makes a lot of sense.”  -