Discover a selection of the best image banks and royalty-free photos to improve the visuals of your e-commerce and dropshipping website. Good photos and images help you sell better by giving your visitors the possibility to imagine themselves using your products.
Why use royalty-free photos for your products?
There is nothing worse than a website selling products or services online that uses poor quality photos or images. A pixelated, blurred or absolutely not elegant photo is a criterion that can make your customer run away. It is simply because it does not reassure him. If your site is not able to display a nice picture correctly, why would a customer trust you to ship his product?
The more you use good quality images that are quick to load, the more likely you are to reassure and convert your customer. The principle is to allow him to project himself on the use of your product and to have a setting in situation. If you sell watches in dropshipping for example, it will be much more effective to show someone wearing this watch than to select only images with white backgrounds. Royalty free photos can therefore be used to illustrate your website and to make better quality photo montages than your competitors.
Licenses and limits of use of free photos
There are several licenses that allow or not to use or modify these photos and images for commercial purposes or not. Indeed, you can very well find a bank of images that you can use on the packaging or the packaging of your products and this in a free way. But if you start to sell products with this image, you may have to pay extra! Here are the different licenses from the most flexible to the least flexible.
- Royalty free: free use even for commercial purposes.
- Rights managed : exclusivity of the image.
- Editorial use: to be used only to illustrate current events or public interest as for newspapers.
Next are the creative commons licenses:
- CC-BY : unlimited use, but obligation to cite the author.
- CC-BY-SA : unlimited use, but obligation to allow free use of your work.
- CC-BY-ND : unlimited use, but no right to modify the image.
- CC-BY-NC : unlimited use, but no right to use the image for commercial use or promotion.
- CC-BY-NC-SA : unlimited use, but you must allow free use of your work.
- CC-BY-ND-SA : unlimited use, without the right to modify the image.
It all sounds very complicated! Fortunately, this explains it more simply every time you upload an image!
The best sites to get free photos and images
I have selected a series of sites that will allow you to download images for free. Be careful with the licenses, but there will be no problem to use all these pictures to illustrate your e-commerce or dropshipping site:
- Unsplash with very high quality photographs.
- Pexels with all kinds of images.
- Pixabay which allows to have nice finds.
- Freepik which is a must for all those who use Photoshop or Illustrator with vector illustrations.
These are my favorites, but know that Shopify has also unearthed some great sites to grab pretty photos for free to use for their online store.
These are the four image bank sites I use on a daily basis. A special mention for Freepik which also allows you to have Mockup. It’s very useful when you sell scanned products. Unsplash is my favorite to get nice images without taking the headache.
To illustrate your site with beautiful icons, nothing like the famous flaticon created by freepik!
Online Free Picture: Where else can you find them?
The most important thing is to know if an image is free or copyrighted. After that, comes the step where you have to find free photos. For this, there is a certain process to follow. At first, you can use the recommendations of the previous title on the use of the Google Image tool. It represents a very advantageous archive. Then, you can try to find free photos on platforms that are specialized for this type of image. These sites are very numerous. In fact, in most cases, they tell you about CC0 (Creative Common Zero). The latter allows you to use the images as you want.
Thus, from the official platform, you can read that CC0 allows you to copy, modify, distribute and even represent the work. This is possible even for commercial purposes without the need for authorization. However, the most reliable and used solution to find free photos is simply to buy them. There is a very large number of image bank platforms. These images are offered at very attractive prices, especially if you want to take a lot of them.
On which sites can I find free photos?
It is important to illustrate your contents well in order to touch the sensibility of the Internet users. Indeed, visuals have a considerable impact on your internet platform, your blog, your social network. Thus, you have the ability to captivate the attention of the Internet user and consequently push him to action. These are the images that will encourage users to continue browsing your site or to click on your link. In this case, to find the ideal photos, you don’t need to budget too much. You have banks that offer free photos that are very usable. Here are most of these image banks.
Pixabay
Pixabay has more than 870,000 completely free and royalty-free images on its website. Indeed, this platform is a reference in this field. The images present on the platform are very varied and have an excellent quality. Moreover, on Pixabay, you don’t have to register to be able to download photos.
Freepik
This platform is primarily a graphic resource platform. However, it has over 200,000 photos with excellent quality. These photos are also free. With the contents of the Freepik platform, you can make the illustration of your internet platform, set up brochures, illustrate a magazine, an infographic, a flyer and also posts on social platforms. The contents offered by Freepik are mostly for designers, but everyone has the possibility to use them.
Unsplash
Unsplash is a Canadian platform that offers more than 20 000 photos that are often found on websites. The different startups use them for their website or also for paper media. This image bank offers photos that are very pleasant to look at. Moreover, the photos are accessible and usable to all.
Pexels
The Pexels image bank stands out from the others thanks to the quality of the photos it offers. These photos are free photos and can be used for commercial purposes. Even though it only offers 25,000 images, you can choose from a wide range of photos for your daily needs.
FreeJPG
This image platform offers more than 10,000 high quality and recent photos. In fact, you can choose from a wide range of categories to find the right images for your Internet content. This platform gives you the possibility to sort the pictures by color. It is also an excellent asset if you want to enrich your blog.
Google Image Search
With this search, you have the possibility of applying a filter to just see the free photos. Moreover, with this one, you benefit from the power of Google search.
Picjumbo
Picjumbo is a platform that offers you a free photo every day. It has thousands of downloads since its creation.
Wikimedia Commons
The Wikimedia Commons platform is the image bank of the great encyclopedic site Wikipedia. In fact, on this platform you can choose between millions of photos, videos and sounds. With it, you will be able to find the image you need.
Freeimages
This platform offers about 400,000 free photos on different themes grouped into several categories. The contents of the Freeimages platform are very varied and are intended for all professionals. However, you have to register on the platform to be able to download them.
Stockvault
The stockvault platform contains about 100 000 free photos available for all projects. Indeed, you can find on the platform photos of very good quality. With the quality of the offered photos, you can set up your website as a commercial brochure. Moreover, the selection of different themes is one of the strong points of the platform.
Free photos: How to determine if a photo is copyrighted?
For all those who market on social platforms and publish content, having free photos is an important task. Indeed, when you regularly share content, it is essential to insert images. With a well-detailed photo in the right format, you are able to attract the interest of the community. However, you may not be able to create your own photos all the time. In this case, the first question is whether the photos you use are free photos. You must be able to recognize which photos are protected. If this is the case, you should avoid using such photos. Most beginners in the field do not budget for purchasing photos. They just do Google searches and download found images.
You should know that the images are the property of their creator and the photos belong to the people who took them. So you are not allowed to use them except for the ones you created yourself. Nowadays, there are a lot of tools to create graphics very quickly. However, the photos you often need must have real and authentic subjects. In this case, the exercise is to find out if the photos are free photos or not. To do this, you need to follow the instructions below to find out if the photos you are taking are free photos or not. It is important to understand that these steps are for your research on the Internet.
How to know if a photo is free or not?
To find out if a photo is free or not, Google has set up the Google Image tool. In fact, to use it, you have to go to the corresponding page by putting as URL “images.google.com” and then you click on the icon representing the camera. This way, you can drag and drop or upload an image for the search. After that, you can start a search. Google does not search for the keywords you enter. The search is based exclusively on the image you have suggested. This is already an excellent starting point. Google recognizes the picture and therefore recommends the source to you. The photo may be the property of a free photo bank and the tool confirms that it is free.
However, if you want to optimize your results, you can click on the “advanced search” option in the settings. Then select what you want and you will get exhaustive results. In fact, if the image you imported from Google is part of an element, you will know it thanks to the search engine after adding the filter. However, if you want to use the picture without infringing on the copyright, I advise you to send an email first. Otherwise, the photo must come from a site where you can find free photos.
