23 stock photo sites to make your presentation unforgettable
Design is the intermediary between information and understanding.
(Hans Hoffman)
An effective presentation makes the best use of the relationship between the presenter and the audience. It takes full consideration of the audience’s needs in order to capture their interest, develop their understanding, inspire their confidence and achieve the presenter’s objectives.
90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text. (Sources: 3M Corporation and Zabisco, Hubspot). So images have the power to trigger an immediate and emotional response from your audience.
There are a lot of amazing sources of high-quality photography you can use for free. Today we are sharing 23 great sites with breathtaking free stock photos you can use for your presentations.
Unsplash — one of the greatest resources for free photos. Over 50,000 of real and honest photos contributed by talented people. Unsplash offers ten new photos every ten days via an email subscription as well as simply on their website. All photos are licensed under Creative Commons Zero, “which means you can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free, including commercial purposes, without asking permission from or providing attribution to the photographer or Unsplash.”
Pexels — a subscription-based pack of high quality stock photos (CC0). The collection currently includes over 6,000 high-resolution free stock photos, and every month at least 1500 new high resolution photos will be added. You can scroll randomly or set the filter by categories like ‘popular photos’ or ‘leaderboard’.
Gratisography —a collection of free to use photos from one photographer, Ryan McGuire, a “whimsically creative visual artist, based in Ithaca, NY.” New photos are added weekly.
Picjumbo — with over 3,165, 675 downloads since its 2013 launch, Picjumbo is a popular free resource, created by designer & photographer Viktor Hanacek. Users can either click through the different categories of over 800 high resolution photos for free, or download a pack that includes all images as well as three Photoshop mockups, in exchange for a donation of $15 or more.
Death to the Stock Photo — it’s a new batch of stock photos you can use every month. They also have a premium service as well that provides more photography and helps fund photographers’ work (basic 15$/month with the brand new photo pack every other week, premium 180$/year with the full access to all of the media through the next year).
Negative Space — adds 20 new free stock images every week, and all are listed under the CC0 license. Images are sortable by category, copy space, position, and color. You can also follow Negative Space on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, for updates on new image additions.
Pixabay — over 500,000 free photos, vectors, art illustrations, videos. Pixabay has fantastic Google-Images style search because the results page allows you to see so many options in one place.
Life Of Pix — a collection of free high-resolution stock images donated to the public domain by the Leeroy Advertising Agency in Montreal. Life of Pix also has a counterpart, Life of Vids. According to its website, Life of Vids serves up free footage videos, clips, and loops, weekly.
Kaboompics — a great place to get breathtaking free pictures. Karolina, a web designer from Poland, is the creative eye behind this awesome resource.
ISO Republic — was founded in October 2014 by Tom Eversley, a designer and photographer from England. You can browse through the categories include architecture, nature, people, textures, urban, and everyone’s favourite, “various” and/or sign up for email list and receive photos right to your inbox. Also there are premium photo packs you can buy 25$ each.
Startup Stock Photos — Simple, trendy photos of the startup environment and equipment. The photos are especially great as free social media images when you are sharing links to content such as a professional blog post, where the most fitting visual is of someone on a computer or in a casual business setting.
IM Free — offers a “curated collection of free web design resources, all for commercial use”. The royalty free collections include templates, icons, button makers, along with classic free stock images organized by themes such as technology, inspiration, cityscape, and many more.
Stocksnap.io — proudly claims that it’s “not your typical crappy stock photo site”. They are dishing out hundreds of high-resolution images each week, which can be sorted by date added, trending, number of views, number of downloads, as well as through keyword searches.
FancyCrave — easy to navigate website releases two new images from professional photographers everyday. Especially cool here are the Photo Packs they put together, giving you a group of images (free or name your price!) under one theme, such as “Cinematic Clouds” and “Silhouette People”.
Splitshire — powered by Italian photographer Daniel Nanescu, all of the images available on the website are “made with love” — and it shows. He even has vector images and videos. Nanescu’s photos which previously lived “on a hard drive gathering dust” are now, for good reason, being used on websites like The Huffington Post, CNN, as well as numerous books and magazine covers.
New Old Stock — is great collection of real vintage photos taken from the public archives that are completely free of known copyright restrictions. Visual designer Cole Townsend has scoured the Flickr Commons so you don’t have to. Separate from the Creative Commons, the Flickr Commons is a collection of institutions from around the world that have provided photos from their archives that are free of copyright restrictions.
Jay Mantri — is a graphic designer and photographer that shares seven new photos every Thursday under the CC0 license. He goes heavy on the black and white, and his photos are without people, so no model releases are needed. If you are needing to quickly find an image for your content or social media posting, I suggest changing to the archive view for a condensed appearance.
And the last but not least — stock photo sites that have one main theme.
Peekspace — free to use space photographies, picked by Patrick Goethe from thousands of images.
FoodiesFeed — resource created by Jakub Kapusnak with non-stockish, natural looking images of food and free digital goods related to food with over 485.584 downloads.
BucketListly Photos — a free creative common collection of travel photos anyone can use. Brought to you by Pete R., founder of BucketListly.
Travel Coffee Book — a large collection of beautiful travel moments available as CC0 photos.
SpaceX Photos — exclusive collection of promotional SpaceX stock photography available for free on Flickr.
Free Nature Stock — was created and is maintained by Adrian Pelletier. One new photo is added every day.
Make your next presentation even more effective and engaging with these websites. Let us know which one of them is your favourite.
P.S. Are you ready to rock? Yes? Go to Presentain and share your passion with your audience!
