January is an ideal time to think about what images you’re using to represent your organization. Do these images best represent your work? Will supporters or constituents see themselves depicted in the pictures you’re using? Are there photos that you should capture over the course of the year that better express your organization’s work and voice?
Your organization may need to refresh content with your photos or use some stock images. If you don’t have a budget for outside images, it can be hard to find free photos that are aligned with your brand and organization. Historically, free photos tend to feel like generic stock photos.
Below are a several stock image websites that we’ve used for client projects and our blog posts. These are sites that we recommend and tend to have a wider variety of available images.
Free Options
Unsplash
This website is a resource with over 400,000 free high-resolution photos. The search field is reasonably handy. When you download photos, they ask you to credit the photographer when possible (which is a recommended practice for free photos).
Pixabay
Pixabay requires creating a log-in, but they have over 500,000 Free Images and 650 free videos available. Their website allows you to search by orientation, category, size, and color. Additionally, you can differentiate between photos, vector graphics, and illustrations.
Gratisography
This website provides free high-resolution pictures that are free of copyright restrictions. The images on Gratisography can be pretty quirky which is helpful for some organizations. They have fewer images than other sites but add new pictures each week.
StockSnap
StockSnap curates their photos from a pool of submissions. The pictures are free to download and help feature photographer. When you search for photos, the first eight entries are from Shutterstock and link to their paid site. The images below those are free to download through StockSnap.
Pexels
All photos on Pexels are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, which means you can use them for free for any personal and commercial purpose. Pexels has fewer options available but has very high-quality photos. The search functionality is more limited than other options. Attribution is not required, but they do make it easy to attribute photos.
New Old Stock
These are historical photos that are free of known copyright restrictions. There are great photos here, but you have to scroll through them to find pictures.
Paid Options
Does your organization have a budget for images? Congratulations! Below are a few recommended sites that charge for images.
Colorstock
Colorstock is the first curated stock photo marketplace featuring people of color. Their website offers images of Black, Asian, Latinx, and other ethnically-diverse people at work and at play.
We worked on a project for an organization that hosted a summer conference for young people. We couldn’t show photos from the event itself and had to rely on stock photos that could evoke the spirit of the event. We were challenged with how many of the available images featured only/predominately white children. Colorstock is a great resource to choose photos that better reflect your work and the world around us.
If you’re looking for other options for stock photos with people of color, we recommend this Medium post from Camille Eddy.
iStock by Getty Images
If you have a budget for images, this is an option with beautiful photos and a good search system. The cost set-up is credits based or subscription based. We’ve used iStock for one project where we needed a particular type of photo, and it was helpful.
Bigstock
Bigstock is one of the largest providers of stock photos. They have over 60 million stock photos, videos, and vectors. They have a few different plans. You can also pilot them for a free week to see if it’s a fit (just remember to cancel your subscription).
Photo by Aravind Kumar on Unsplash.