Free Stock Photo Sites with Unique and useful content

Being in the Free Stock Photo Niche for years, I've come across many sites offering free stock photos. Half of them are just flikr search engines that produce the same content from site to site. Others are aggregates using the API of many sites to create their own content. However, there are some very useful ones that have their own content and are very useful for projects of all sorts. I only look for sites with CC0 Licenses so this list will only have sites whose photos are CC0 or public domain. Because of this, free photos from places like dreamstime(free section) will not be listed because even enough these photos are free, they have a very restrictive usage license. The photos here are free with no strings attached. Please note that all large public domain photo repositories do borrow from each other(including this site) so you will see the same images sometimes from site to site. The list below does its best to list sites with unique content although it will include a flikr search to be complete and comprehensive.

1. Good Free Photos -- This site has over 20,000 free stock photos all under the public domain license. Photos are categorized by location and is very specific on the country, state, city, or park/landmark these photos are taken at. This site is great for travel sites, brochures, writing reports, as well as photo for web design and art.

2.Unsplash -- This site is made up of tens of thousands of photos from hundreds of individuals who submitted their work to unsplash. All Photo are public domain and the site has some really beautiful photos. The tagging and search isn't the best but many times you can find what you want just by scrolling down.

3. Pixabay -- This is possibly the largest database of public domain photos on the net. Over 1 million free to use images of every category. The admins also contribute lots of their own photos.

4. Pexels -- Pexels offers high quality stock photos. Although they draw heavily from unsplash and pixabay for their content, they do have several authors themselves that produce content.

5. Public Domain Pictures -- Public Domain Pictures is one of the oldest large repositories of public domain photos on the net. These offer hundreds of thousands of photos under the CC0 License. However, their highest resolution photos do require a subscription. Otherwise, everything else is free.

6. Morgue File -- Over 350,000 free photos for personal or commercial use.

7. Visual Hunt -- Visual hunt pools a lot of sites together for photo resources. When your search, please be sure to hit the "public domain" tab when you look at the results.

8. Pick Up Image -- A large public domain photo database made of multiple authors.

9. Ancestry Images -- Over 35,000 antique images free to use.

10. Image Base -- A large searchable database of free images>

These are the ones I recommend. Please not that when searching images on google, you cannot use the images in the results for free. You must go to "settings" and "advanced" and select the "free to use, even commercially" license type for images you can use. Even not all of those are public domain as you must attribute the author in many of those images. That's why I believe its best to look for photos that are released under the CC0 License.

Different licensing and image types video: