Photos under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license are completely free to use for any legal purpose – including use on your website, newsletter, or print material. Unfortunately, these stock photos are often hard to find.
In fact, I normally use Adobe Stock or 123rf for all of my stock photo needs. This can get pricey, especially since I often use multiple images for blogs I write.
I recently discovered freephotos.cc, which aggregates free stock photos under the creative commons license from various sources on the web. The website is also free to use, and you don’t even have to register.
Even better, the site works really well – you can search keywords and key phrases to narrow your results, and most images you can download directly without having to go to another website.
I was even surprised at the quality of the images, most of which are high resolution and were very suitable for multiple purposes – at least for the first set of results. Once you start scrolling down they can get a bit random. Despite the various random pictures that come up, you can’t really complain much about having a free alternative source for stock images.
Freephotos isn’t going to become my main source of stock images, but I definitely plan to use it in the future for various digital marketing initiatives – it’s a great supplemental source that adds a bit more variety to my current selection!
