When it comes to blogging images are probably the most important piece to a blog post. And a lot of times, people are too impatient to when it comes to reading, but if you select the right images it will make visitors more likely to read your content.

I’ve found that a lot of bloggers don’t put too much time into looking for the right image to help connect with their visitors to read the article. I’ve even found theme designers and developers not find stock images to show off their latest WordPress themes.

At Headway Themes, we’ve had many discussions about where to find the best images for our templates and we wanted to share those with you as well. We’ve collected a list of free high quality stock image sites for you to use in your next project.

Unsplash

This is probably our favorite site for finding high quality pictures for Headway Templates. If you’ve taken a look at some of our templates — specifically the demos — you might notice some images from this site. Unsplash provides 10 new photos every 10 days. It’s probably the best license out there when it comes to images as they are CC0, which is basically public domain. You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission. I thought it would be good to include a few examples.

Pixabay

Another site I personally like searching for images on is Pixabay. Pixabay provides images free of copyrights as well. All pictures are published under Creative Commons public domain deed CC0 (same as unsplash). You do need to be care of what images you click though as they will return some images from Shutterstock. It’s simply to finance Pixabay and provide a choice of professional photos. Here’s a few examples.

PhotoPin

PhotoPin is a search engine of sorts as you can search based on terms. PhotoPin helps bloggers find photos for their blog and makes adding them to their posts fast and easy. It uses the Flickr API and searches creative commons photos to use for your blog. PhotoPin also has some results from iStockPhoto, which I’m guessing is to help keep their site up and running. Here’s a few examples of what you can find.

Little Visuals

Like unsplash, Little Visuals provides the creative commons public domain deed CC0 high-resolution images. However, they only provide 7 images, zipped right into your inbox, every 7 days. I’ve never seen an image that was on Little Visuals end up on Unsplash or vice versa, so it’s always helpful to have multiple places to get images from. Here’s some samples of Little Visuals images.

Superfamous Studios

Superfamous is the Los-Angeles-based studio of Dutch interaction designer Folkert Gorter. He provides his images on this site under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Basically meaning that you can use the work for your own purposes — including commercial use — as long as credit is provide. Here’s a few examples of Folkert’s images.

Dotspin

Dotspin is a photo-sharing platform created by lovers of sharing responsibly, and in an ordered manner. It’s main goal is to create the world’s largest bank of photographic content shared under Creative Commons licenses. Dotspin offers users a fun experience through which they can share pictures and receive well-deserved rewards.

I think one of the coolest sites I’ve come across, the way it works it pretty cool. When you snap a photo with Instagram or Twitter and tag it with #dotspin, they are then voted upon and evaluated by their community. If the photo is outstanding, you’ll get credits towards cool rewards.

Death to the Stock Photo

Death to the Stock Photo provides free high-resolution lifestyle photography to you monthly directly in your inbox. It even allows you to do whatever you want with the photos. I’ve only recently found this one and have got a few images.

We Function

We function, offers a few photos that are free and worth taking a look at for any project you may be working on. I like a lot of the photos they provide, but I can’t say that I’ve used them a ton in my projects.

Gratisography

Gratisography by Bells Design is a site that gets updated weekly with new free high-resolution pictures. They allow you to use them on both personal and commercial projects. Just click on an image and you’ll start downloading the high-resolution version. Here’s a few that I like.

And that concludes the list. I would definitely take a look through each of these sites the next time you are needing an image for your blog post or Headway Template. Images go a long way in explaining your content, and it’s high time that we start finding better quality images to go along with out content.

If you’ve got any sites you go to that provides high-quality free stock images, please let us know in the comments. We’d love to take a look and add them to our list!