Not all of us can afford to hire a photographer or take professional photographs. What if you just need an image of White Rock Beach (White Rock BC). Then use this splendid photo by Pete Nuij from Unsplash. There are sooo many free resources now for your photographic needs. Before you use these make sure you check their usage rights. They are free but asks that you give attribution. Here are some I use and recommend.
Photography
Unsplash – The best site to get high quality free images. It is amazing what you can find here. Need an image for your COVID-19 blog post or a smiling Quokka from Australia. Here you go! But be nice and give some love to the photographer and give them credit. This super cute quokka image is from Tobias Fischer.
Rawpixel – This site has free, paid and public domain images.
Wikimedia Commons – All free and anyone can contribute. Not all are gems but you probably find something from the 73 million images they say they have.
Burst – This site was built by Shopify, the popular eCommerce platform, mainly for their customers. If you are planning on selling online, check out their collection of business kits and you can download a set of photos based on your business ideas.
Free graphics, patterns, lettering guides
Even if I can make my icons, I use some of these sites to get icons for my projects. It saves me time and the designer/photographer gets paid (for my more premium icon needs).
- Noun Project -icons and images (free with attribution)
- Streamline – quite new to my knowledge but excellent icons in SVG. A lot of free icons and illustrations but for full access there is a pro (paid) version if you need lots more
- Google icons
- Icon store – https://iconstore.co/
- Chris Spooner – https://blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/ – needs to subscribe
- Creative Market – freebies every Monday https://creativemarket.com/
- Adobe Creative Cloud- Discover – free but needs Adobe Creative Cloud subscription
- Teela Cunningham – https://every-tuesday.com/ – free for subscribers
- Ian Barnard – https://www.subscribepage.com/letteringtoolbox
- Shape.so – icons, illustrations – https://shape.so/
Last thoughts
Reminder: Before you download images and before you upload please read the licensing agreement before using any image you get online. Most of these are offered for free if you use them for personal projects like blogs. Some attribution may be required for other purposes or a fee for using the image if you will use them for business.
Before you upload the image to your website, please make sure you compress the image into smaller file sizes. Find out how large the image should be then reduce using Photoshop or an online tool like Tiny JPG and Tiny PNG. The White Rock image width is 1440 pixels. This size will be enough for typical desktop browser viewing. Why do you need to do that? Using images with large file sizes (above 200 kb) will slow down your page load. It slows down your website! So don’t forget.
I hope this information helps you out in some ways. 🙂