Where to find great stock photos

The best images to use on your site are, of course, your own images. But if you aren’t, just like me, a photographer, you have to look elsewhere. You can’t just pluck an image from Google. Every image falls under copyright laws. So if the maker of the image you’re using finds out, they can sue you.

So, what do you do when you don’t have your own images? Go for stock photos. In this blog, I will highlight two sites you can use without being afraid of being sued. 

Unsplash

This is by far my favorite site to use. Every image you see on my sites, posts, blogs, etc is from Unsplash. Unless it's an image of myself.

The images are free, that’s a big plus for me. You can search for any topic in the search bar and the images with that topic will appear. Also at the top of the site, you can choose a topic and all the images that are linked to that topic are shown.

You can collect images by clicking on +collect and add an image to a collection you set up. So you don’t need to download the image right away but can easily find it again.

Getty Images

This is another site you can use. This site works with subscriptions for different kinds of quality images. The bigger and better the quality, the more you pay per image. A big advantage for Getty is that they also have videos you can buy. They have a huge collection of videos from the BBC, the Smithsonian, Walt Disney Studios, and many more sources. You can also buy music and sound effects from them.

Both sites have a collaboration with Squarespace so it's easy to add the images on your site without downloading them.