Free stock photography resources for your email marketing campaigns

Using imagery in your campaigns is a great way to capture your audience’s attention. Finding the right imagery can however be costly and time-consuming. You may prefer (or have the budget) to have professional images taken when needed but there may also come a time when you’re strapped for time and need an image quickly.

That’s where stock photography can be a great resource. Stock photography is defined as the supply of photos that hold a specified license for use (which protects you against any copyright violations). While there are many paid-for services such as Shutterstock, you may want to consider free services with a great variety of image options. Whatever your need, budget or time constraints this list of free stock photography resources offer you the opportunity to get high-resolution images at no cost to you.

Pexels

Pexels is a free stock photography website that offers a great variety of images for you to choose from. The search functionality makes it really easy to search for images and find what you are looking for. Pexels.com also offers a lot of free stock video footage.

Pexels Home Screen

Unsplash

Photos for everyone, that’s the Unsplash strapline and they deliver on that. Unsplash offers a wide range of imagery with categories across sustainability, travel, nature, textures and patterns and many more.

Unsplash Home Screen

Gratisography

Gratisography offers users a modern fun and bold website to search for free photos that they can use. The website is funky, modern and Gratisography promotes itself as the space to be for unique imagery.

Gratisography Home Screen

Morguefile

Something that makes Morguefile unique is that you are able to request images. This sets this free stock photography website apart from others. The website interface is sleek and simple.

Morguefile Home Screen

Pixabay

With over 1.8 million images available to choose from, you’ll be spoilt for choice when it comes to finding the perfect images for your email marketing campaigns. Popular images on the site are nature, business, food and computer focussed amongst many others.

Pixabay Home Screen

Stockvault

Stockvault offers free stock photos and adds new photos, textures and illustrations every day. Photographers are able to upload images easily and the website has a great blog that curates images for you.

Stockvault Home Screen

Picjumbo

Picjumbo is another great stock photography website with a great selection of images free to use for personal or commercial use. A great feature that they have is that you are able to download all their free images in one go by simply donating whatever you like. Included in this download are 3000+ images as well as three realistic-looking PSD mockups. A great benefit of downloading the pack is that it might save you time when searching for imagery.

Picjumbo Home Screen

Pikwizard

Something that we really like about Pikwizard is how their images are categorised. The alphabetic categories make it easy to find what you are looking for. The website also has a great selection of free stock videos that you can use.

Pikwizard Home Screen

Rawpixel

Rawpixel makes our list as it has an especially great selection of vectors, illustrations and photos. If you’re looking for images within a certain theme or style, you can take a look at their creative boards that are similar to Pinterest boards with “collections” of photos.

Rawpixel Home Screen

Reshot

Reshot aims to provide free stock photography without the images looking like stock photography. It’s unique in this sense as most of the resources mentioned before don’t sell this as a benefit.

Reshot Home Screen

Stock photography Pro’s

• Wide variety of image styles and topics available
• Lots of free options available
• Easy to access and download
• Saves time - no need to plan photoshoots and liaise with photographers and models
• Free = saves you money

Stock photography Cons

• Images can be used by anyone, which means your competitors could be using the same images as you
• Depending on which images you choose, people could recognize them as stock imagery, making them feel inauthentic
• Can be expensive if you choose to use paid images. Some providers offer multiple download subscriptions or you can pay per image

Whether you decide to use stock photography or not is up to you, but it can add greatly to your campaigns if your creative budgets are tight. Using these high-resolution images, you’ll be able to easily add your own brand flair to the images and make them uniquely your own.

Do you use any free stock photography resources that we should add to this list? Tell us in the comments below.