The Best Places to Find Royalty-Free Photos For Your Blog

If you publish a blog, you’re probably relying on images to catch readers’ eyes and convey your message. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words, and it’s easy to find plenty of images out there with a couple of keystrokes. But you have to be careful – pull a photo off of a Google Image search, and it might be copyrighted. If you use it without permission, you could end up owing a lot of money.Luckily there are also plenty of places to find copyright-free images that you can use on your blog with a clear conscience and no charge. Here’s a roundup of some of the best sites to visit if you’re searching for images.Stock Xchange: It’s easy to search either the categories listed or use the search feature to find an image here. Most of the images are high quality, and could also be used in a presentation. Be careful to read closely, however, as different images have different restrictions. While many photos are free, some require an attribution.Creative Commons: This is a site that allows you to search for clip art or photos across multiple websites, and gives you great options. You can choose to search popular image sites like Flickr, Pixabay, or Fotopedia. Creative Commons also allows you to search for music and video. This is another site where you’ll want to make sure images that are returned are under a Creative Commons license – not all of them are.StockPhotosforFree.com: All of the photos here come with a royalty free license and are free to download. This website’s strong suit is in more generalized images; a search for something as specific as “social media” turns up images of fruit, whereas a search for “business” is a little more on the mark with stock images of money and briefcases.morgueFile: MorgueFile provides free, high resolution images. Sometimes you will be asked to give credit to the photographer, but all images are cost-free.