10+ Free Photography Resources to Beautify a Coworking Blog
When you are running a business, you produce content regularly. Especially when we talk about coworking space where everything is related to community, networking, and interaction. You can't create any attention-grabbing content without top-quality imagery. But it's simply impossible to hire a professional photographer every time!
Where do you go to find a few pretty pictures for your blog article, Facebook, or Instagram post? You start to search Google. The process is rather time-consuming. There are thousands of image galleries out there. Nobody wants to check out dozens of sites hunting for a couple of pics.
Besides, there are lots of traps on your image hunt — poor quality of visuals, wrong size, copyrights, etc.
How to avoid all these challenges? I advise you to keep a few image libraries at hand. In this article, I featured 10 free stock photo websites to consider. I am sure you will bookmark a few websites for yourself.
Undoubtedly, the best image for coworking space is one of the actual workspace and community members. Such an image reflects your culture and brand. At the same time, you need different images to tell members your stories, present new services, invite for events, and more. Free stock images can boost your community-building efforts, so don't feel bad when using them.
Just pick out a good repository, check out the image license (CC 0 - no restrictions or CC BY - credit to the photographer is required), and go ahead. So simple, especially when top services (not requiring registration) are already handpicked for your convenience.
Where to Look for Awesome Free Images
10 free photography sites offering premium images.
1. Kaboompics
Kaboompicks project is maintained by Karolina Grabowska and actually is a "one woman show". Karolina is a professional in creating amazing digital images. The photos she compiles here will help you visualize your coworking world, business, and ideas.
Kaboompics is a wonderful source for all sorts of imagery related to lifestyle, interior design, and specialized blogging niche. There are nearly 17922 free shots available on site at the moment. The photos from Kaboompics are so qualitative that they appear on BBC, CNN, Forbes, Cosmopolitan, Huffington Post, and others.
2. Freepik
Freepik is the go-to destination for avid content enthusiasts who require a reliable source of free stock images and design resources for any personal or business projects.
Founded in 2010 by brothers Alejandro and Pablo Blanes, along with their friend Joaquín Cuenca, they felt the urge to create a platform where designers could find free graphic resources.
Today the site has grown exponentially in stature and popularity thanks to its stockpile of free-to-use, high-resolution, quality-controlled stock imagery and other graphic design assets such as vector images, illustrations, mockups, fonts, and even stock videos, everything you need to create engaging content. There is a sense of community within the Freepik universe, whereby contributors gain recognition, money per download, and even feedback on their hard work. Premium members will benefit from premium content and no need for attribution.
3. Pixabay
Pixabay is a resource to look for free stock photography for a coworking blog or social media. The website was originally founded by Hans Braxmeier and Simon Steinberger (IT professionals), but now it is owned by Canva, which is a fast-growing, reputable online design platform.
Photos on Pixabay are crowdsourced from creatives around the world. The library includes over one million varied royalty-free images. All of them are of HD quality and available for free download. The resource does accept submissions from anyone, but a professional photographer and image editor curate them. The photos are manually reviewed for technical quality and legal validity before publication, so they are a safe choice for your marketing team.
4. Skitterphoto
Skitterphoto was launched in 2014 by two amateur photographers, Peter Heeling and Rudy van der Veen from Groningen and Drenthe (Netherlands). They decided to publish pictures they shoot on their own website because it was hard to find good quality photos for free.
The project grew in popularity, people from different corners of the world started to use those images, which motivated Peter and Rudy to make better pictures and allow other photographers to upload their artworks as well.
All photos on Skitterphoto are public domain, which means you can use them for free for any purpose your coworking brand might have. You may download and edit photos (e.g., remove backgrounds) and even use them commercially.
5. PikWizard
PikWizard is a free stock photos resource owned by Wavebreak Media, which is a photo and video production company headed by Sean Prior, entrepreneur and videographer. The website makes a good impression of a professional resource. It offers hundreds of thousands of images from various contributors for free. Most of them are seasoned stock media producers.
The library has its own custom license, which allows the use of images in commercial projects, with a sensitive use clause. You can't resale pics from PikWizard or use them for resale products such as t-shirts, posters, etc. These are the only copyright restrictions.
Anyway, the resource includes tons of artistic and commercial styled visuals, which you can quickly edit on-page with the DesignWizard tool. This is a nice free tool to add text to images, for example.
6. Unsplash
Unsplash is a popular destination for those who need a cute visual to revive a piece of content. It offers over one million free high-resolution images from creative photographers living all over the globe.
Unsplash was born to address the pain in finding great, usable imagery. I am sure you also have this issue, just like me. So, this website contains a variety of images for your coworking blog, Facebook, or Instagram account, presentations for members, artworks, mockups, and more.
Unsplash is a platform driven by the community donating hundreds of thousands of their own photos to fuel creativity around the world. To grab some pictures for yourself, you can sign up for free, however, even if you don’t, you will have access to over a million photos under the Unsplash license. It lets you do whatever you want with them without paying a cent.
7. SplitShire
The idea behind the SplitShire project name is in the symbiosis of two words — “split” + “shire”. Here “shire” represents the county, a closed environment for a few (related to copyright), and “split” represents sharing a piece of this county with everyone.
SplitShire was created to give life to photographs that would have otherwise gone into oblivion without any utility. So, you are free to use thousands of high-resolution images for personal and commercial purposes.
Images from this resource can be seen on websites like The Huffington Post, CNN, Books Covers, Magazines, and thousands of niche blogs.
8. Gratisography
Gratisography was founded and created by Ryan McGuire, who is passionate about building community through art.
Ryan's resource is not after quantity. It is a curated collection of the most interesting pictures, the ones with a personality, a perspective, a story to tell.
Each Gratisography image brings something unique. All of them are perfectly composed, with the right amount of light and exposure, and a sharp focus on the central subject. In addition to everything mentioned above, those visuals break barriers, they break stony faces into genuine smiles, they can break hearts, and at times even scare.
If you are looking for a special image that will make an impression on your members/prospects, you will probably find it on Gratisography.
9. StockSnap
StockSnap resource exists with a single goal — transform good content into great with compelling, eye-catching, attention-grabbing, sharp, and arresting visual images. The website gathers pictures suitable for business websites, printed brochures, digital or magazine ads, or any other creative projects.
All photos in stock are available for free even for commercial usage.
10. NegativeSpace
NegativeSpace is another awesome resource for modern, quality photos portraying a variety of topics and subjects. The website is simple and understandable. It accepts photos from contributors after a process of portfolio submission and image review, which guarantees decent image quality for professional use.
The pictures come under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, which lets you use them free for commercial projects.
11. Burst
Burst is a free stock photo platform that is powered by Shopify. Their image library includes thousands of high-resolution, royalty-free images that were shot by their global community of photographers.
Burst was built to provide designers, developers, bloggers, and entrepreneurs with access to beautiful free stock photography. You can use pictures for all kinds of needs and projects — your coworking website, blog, Instagram ads, Facebook posts, and whatnot.
All photos on site are free for commercial use with no attribution required.
12. Wunderstock
Wunderstock is a free photo library that provides access to tens of thousands of high-quality public domain photos.
Resource's mission is to help people find great photos for free. Wunderstock's creative team knows how hard it can be to find an awesome photo on the web and wants to support others in their work. They also hope that by archiving as many public domain photos as possible in one place, images will be preserved for future generations.
I believe you will enjoy Wunderstock and make use of it for your next project.
Over to You
Hope this recap of free stock photography websites will be of great help for your coworking blog and social media accounts. I encourage you to share the list with your friends as well as community members on socials. Most entrepreneurs are hunting for quality imagery all the time. They will appreciate your favor.
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