Photo stocks: looking for high-quality photos for creatives

When launching an advertising campaign, you need to pay a lot of attention to creatives — all affiliates know this. Of course, the ideal option when working with dating is to order photos from a professional. But it is very expensive, and when promoting offers from verticals like goods, information products and other “abstract” products, it does not make sense at all.

The way out is to use photo stocks, where there are millions of options suitable for creatives that you can simply process a little to uniqueize and adjust to your target audience. The main advantage of this solution is that even a beginner will cope with the task. Therefore, let’s look at the best free photo stocks, and also figure out which creatives are the best to enter and bring profit.

Types of photo stocks

The phrase “stock photos” is associated with photos of people in ties with forced smiles. In reality, on such services you can find many images of different subjects and high quality. They will help you create a unique creative that increases CTR. But you need to know which services are best to use.

There are 3 types in total:

• Absolutely free. Pictures can be downloaded free of charge and used for your own purposes (in some situations there may be certain restrictions).
• Conditionally free. Some of the photos on these sites are free, while others are paid (for example, available after paying for a subscription).
• Paid. Contains unique exclusive content. These photo stocks include market giants such as Shutterstock.

In addition to the types of photo stocks, you need to remember about licenses for photos. Sometimes this issue is treated with disdain, but history knows cases when impressive compensations were collected from people through the courts. Therefore, it is better to remember about copyright in order to sleep better. And especially if you work with the worldwide geos, where this issue is taken very seriously.

So, if you plan to use the downloaded images for commercial purposes (and this is true), before downloading the image, you need to check its license and make sure that it does not prohibit such use of the content. Consider the main types of photo licenses.

Creative Commons (CC0)

Such pictures can be used for any purpose and absolutely free of charge, without any restrictions. But there may also be some restrictions here, which you can learn about when uploading a photo – they will definitely be written next to the content on the photo stock.

Royalty-free

This license applies to paid images. How does everything work in this case? You acquire the content with the full right to use it for your own purposes. This option is the most suitable, but paid.

TOP 7 free photo stocks

Since it is more profitable to work with free photo stocks (which is quite logical), we will consider the 7 most popular ones. All of them are time-tested and contain quality content that can be used to create creatives.

1. Unsplash (unsplash.com)

• license – Creative Commons;
• there are more than 2 million available images.

2. StockSnap (stocksnap.io)

• license – Creative Commons;
• there are more than 10 thousand available images.

3. Pexels (pexels.com)

• license – Creative Commons;
• there are over 30 thousand available images.

4. Pixabay (pixabay.com)

• license – Creative Commons;
• there are more than 2 million available images.

5. Freerange (freerangestock.com)

• license – Creative Commons;
• there are more than 42 thousand available images.

6. Free Stock Images (freestockimages.ru)

• license – Creative Commons;
• there are more than 100 thousand available images.

7. Freeimages (freeimages.com)

• license – Creative Commons;
• there are more than 400 thousand available images.