How to Find Eye-Catching Royalty-Free Images for Your WordPress Blog Posts
As a blogger, you know that captivating visual media is key to grabbing your readers‘ attention and boosting engagement with your content. Research has shown that articles with relevant images get 94% more views on average than those without.
However, you can‘t simply do a Google image search and use any photo you find online in your blog posts. Most images are protected by copyright, and using one without the creator‘s permission could land you in hot water. Copyright infringement penalties can reach up to $150,000 per image!
This is where royalty-free images come to the rescue. "Royalty-free" means you can freely use an image in your own work without having to pay royalties (or licensing fees) to the copyright owner. The creator has made the photo available for anyone to use, typically under a Creative Commons CC0 license or released it into the public domain.
Using royalty-free images on your blog has many advantages:
- Avoid copyright issues and potential legal consequences
- Save money on stock photography or licensing fees
- Access a huge selection of high-quality, professionally shot photos
- Quickly find relevant images for any blog post topic
- Use images without restriction – editing, commercial use, no attribution required (in most cases)
To help you build up a great library of photos for your blog, we‘ve curated a list of the top websites to find free-to-use, royalty-free images. Let‘s check them out!
- Creative Commons Image Search (https://search.creativecommons.org)
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that helps creators legally share their work online through free copyright licenses. Their image search tool indexes images from across the web that have Creative Commons licenses.
You can filter your search by the type of license – we recommend selecting "use for commercial purposes" and "modify or adapt" to find the least restrictive images. It searches popular royalty-free photo sites like Flickr and Wikimedia Commons. Always double check the license details when you click through to an image.
- Unsplash (https://unsplash.com)
Unsplash is one of the most popular free stock photo sites, with a growing library of over 3 million high-resolution images. All photos are released under the Unsplash license, which allows for free use for both commercial and personal projects. No permission or attribution is required.
The Unsplash community of photographers is highly active, with new batches of photos published every day. You‘ll find everything from landscapes and cityscapes to flatlay compositions and portraits. Use the intuitive search and collections to quickly find photos for your blog posts.
- Pexels (https://www.pexels.com)
Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. Their massive library includes images selected from other free image sites along with photos uploaded directly by their community of photographers.
In addition to still photography, Pexels also offers a large selection of free stock video footage and a free online video editor. All content is licensed under CC0 and can be downloaded and used for free for commercial and noncommercial use.
- Pixabay (https://pixabay.com)
Pixabay offers a huge collection of free stock photos, vector graphics, illustrations, and videos. All contents are released under the Pixabay license, which makes them safe to use without permission or attribution for digital and printed projects.
You can copy, edit, distribute, and use the images, even for commercial purposes, all without asking for permission. However, identifiable people may not be portrayed in a bad light or in a way that they may find offensive, so keep that in mind when selecting photos.
- Flickr Creative Commons (https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons)
Flickr is a popular photo-sharing community with millions of images uploaded by photographers of all skill levels. Many Flickr users choose to offer their work under a Creative Commons license.
The Flickr Creative Commons portal allows you to search and browse images by license type. Select "Commercial use allowed" and "Modifications allowed" to find images you can freely use on your blog. As always, double check the license on the photo page for exact details.
- Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org)
Wikimedia Commons is a huge media repository created by volunteers that includes millions of freely usable images. It powers Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia Foundation projects.
Since the focus is educational, you‘ll find many images of historical and scientific subjects. Most are available under a Creative Commons or public domain license, but some may have more restrictive terms, so check the details. Give attribution to the creator when possible.
- Library of Congress Free to Use and Reuse Sets (https://www.loc.gov/free-to-use)
The Library of Congress, the national library of the United States, has an extensive digitized collection of historical books, manuscripts, maps, photos, art, and more. Their Free to Use and Reuse Sets offer unrestricted access to thousands of images.
While focused on Americana, the images cover a broad range of subjects. The high-resolution digitized photos are extremely high quality and well preserved. These images are primarily in the public domain, so no copyright restrictions apply, but give attribution to the Library.
- New York Public Library Digital Collections (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org)
Similar to the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library Digital Collections portal offers free access to nearly 900,000 digitized prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming videos, and more.
Many of the images, especially those created before 1925, are believed to be in the public domain and free of known copyright restrictions. Use the filter "Search only public domain materials" and always check the individual item records for specific rights statements.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access Artworks (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search#!?showOnly=openAccess)
World-renowned art museum The Met has made over 400,000 hi-resolution digital images of public domain artworks from their collection available for unrestricted use. You can browse or search their digital collection and filter for Open Access artworks.
These images represent thousands of years of human creativity from prehistory to the present. From Van Gogh to ancient Greek sculpture to antique armor, you‘ll find endlessly fascinating works to illustrate your blog posts. The Met asks that you use their Credit Line for identification.
- British Library Public Domain Images on Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary)
The British Library has been digitizing public domain books from their collections and uploading the beautiful illustrations and photographs to Flickr since 2013. Their photostream now contains over 1 million copyright-free images available for any use.
The collection is very diverse, from vintage botanical and nature illustrations to ancient maps to historical photographs from around the world. The scans are extremely high-resolution and can be downloaded in a variety of sizes up to the original uploaded file.
Tips for Preparing Blog Post Images
Once you‘ve found the perfect royalty-free image for your blog post, take a few extra steps to optimize it before uploading:
Resize the image to fit your blog. Super high-resolution images can slow down page loading. Use photo editing software to resize the image to the appropriate dimensions.
Compress the image file size. Large image files also increase page load times. Use a tool like TinyPNG or Adobe Photoshop‘s "Save for Web" to compress JPEGs and PNGs without losing perceivable quality. Aim for files less than 150 KB.
Choose the right image format:
- For photographs, use JPEG. It was created for compressing photographic images and has the best balance of quality to compression levels.
- For simpler images like logos, graphics, and illustrations, use PNG. It‘s a lossless format that preserves details and supports transparency.
- Avoid GIFs and BMPs, as these are outdated formats that produce unnecessarily large file sizes.
WordPress Plugins for Image Optimization
If you prefer to optimize images after uploading them to your WordPress media library, there are several excellent plugins available:
- Smush compresses, resizes, and optimizes your images, scans for improperly sized images, and can serve images from a CDN.
- ShortPixel Image Optimizer compresses JPEGs, PNGs, and PDFs and offers both lossy and lossless optimization to balance quality and size.
- Imagify optimizes images on upload, can convert to WebP format for even smaller sizes, and integrates with other plugins.
A Final Word on Image Licenses
This article focused on websites that offer very permissive Creative Commons CC0 and public domain images that are free to use without restriction or attribution. However, you may occasionally want to use an image with a more restrictive Creative Commons license, such as BY (requires attribution) or NC (non-commercial use only).
In these cases, always carefully review the license terms and comply with the stated requirements. Provide clear attribution and link to the source. When in doubt, or if you can‘t comply with the license, look for a different image that allows unrestricted use.
We hope this guide helps you find amazing royalty-free images to make your blog posts stand out! Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words, but the right image license is priceless.
