Our Favorite Stock Photo Resources

There are entire websites dedicated to mocking the stock photo. Cheaper than custom photography, but much less authentic, stock photos are often hated by graphic designers but loved by everyone who has to set and stick to a marketing budget.

Every social media or blog post is an important opportunity to communicate about your brand visually, in addition to what you say. In fact, images are likely to grab attention because our brains process visual information faster — by some estimates, 60,000 times faster.

This is why we typically recommend investing in custom photography that perfectly reflects your brand. But when you’re stuck using stock photos, it helps to know where to look to get the best shots.

Love

These sites break the stock photo norm to offer natural, lovely images that are anything but cringe-worthy. They’ll look more realistic and better represent your clientele.

Stocksy

Stocksy is one of our most-used stock resource, and has many fresh, modern images for any type of communication. A co-op site run by artists, Stocksy includes several search filters that make it easy to search by the gender, age, and/or ethnicity of the models. We love this resource because it helps us ensure that our photos represent the diversity of the organizations that we work with. Stocksy also has a wealth of images that look like realistic moments versus staged scenarios. Stocksy contributors are likely using models, but the results look more like real life, and that makes these images stand out from typical stock photos.

Death to the Stock Photo

Death to the Stock Photo offers creative photos both on its site and through email. The title really says it all: This isn’t your average stock photo collection, and the site isn’t typical either. You can’t search by age, gender or ethnicity filters here. What Death to the Stock does best is provide beautiful photography that can be helpful when searching for images to communicate broader concepts (i.e. collaboration, technology, people, travel).

Hit or Miss But Give Them a Try

These sites have some good free options, but there are some caveats.

Unsplash and Pexels. Both companies often yield similar search results, and they may give you images that you’ve seen online before or feature outdated images (hello photo of an iPhone 4). This is the downside of the images being free for all. However, we frequently search these sites for good photos of people, nature or abstract textures to use in the background of a slide, website, etc.

The Usual Suspects

You’re familiar with them already for a reason. Just avoid everything that features fake laughs, office mates posing on escalators, group high fives, or solitary ladies with huge smiles eating salads. Those clichés give stock photos a bad name, and these sites are full of them.

iStock

Operated by Getty Images, iStock offers one of the broadest collections of stock photography. The downside? Buying from iStock can be pricey, which is why we like browsing its collections for creative inspiration when we have time.

Thinkstock

A collection of both iStock and Getty Images, Thinkstock allows you to browse through millions of photos from both collections at once.

Adobe Stock

Integrated with all of Adobe’s creative programs, Adobe Stock makes it easy to find stock photos within Photoshop or Illustrator. Not sure if you want to purchase an image? The site allows you to preview watermarked stock photos within your design.

A Quick Note Before You Download:

Many stock photographs are free from copyright restrictions, or they are licensed under the Creative Commons public domain. This means you can copy, modify and distribute the work — all without asking permission. However, some photos may require attribution. Don’t forget to check a site’s license before you download.