Photos can add a lot to your overall brand image. They exude confidence, show your products/services, and give viewers a chance to envision your space and personality before meeting you.

However, getting photos that are authentically yours are not always available or right for that social post, blog post, or to use as a website placeholder.

Get the same look and feel through imagery by using stock photography! 

Selecting Brand Photography

Before we dive into our favorite places to get stock imagery, let’s chat about which photos to choose. Images are an important part of branding your business – and the vibe they give can be instrumental in getting your message across. 

Talk with your marketing team or branding expert about the images that will best represent you. Is it nature shots? Maybe detailed shots? Action shots? Or maybe even lifestyle portraits? The options are limitless, so create a guideline that will help you select the right images.

Where to Use Photos

It may seem like a lot of work up front to start curating a library of stock photography that coincides with your brand standards. However, we promise it will be best for the long run. Photos are essential when posting on social media, creating marketing materials and campaigns, and adding life to your website.

The Top 10 Stock Photo Websites for Small Businesss

First things first, please know this top 10 list is solely based on our opinions after using each platform. We are not advertising these for payments or kickbacks.

That being said, let’s dive in! Here are some of our favorite stock photo sites (starting from $0 on up) that we would suggest using for your business in 2023.

01. Unsplash

Price: Free

Unsplash is home to a growing community of photographers—from hobbyists, professionals, emerging brands and everyone in between. Unsplash is a platform powered by an amazing community that has gifted hundreds of thousands of their own photos to fuel creativity around the world. Whether you sign up for the platform or not, you’ve got access to over 3 million photos under the Unsplash license—which makes them free to do-whatever-you-want with.

02. Pexels

Price: Free

Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos licensed under the Pexels license. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable, and easy to discover. The platform boasts hundreds of thousands free stock photos and every day new high resolution photos are added. All photos are hand-picked from photos uploaded by users or sourced from free image websites. 

03. Shutterstock

Price: $29+/mo

Shutterstock helps creative professionals from all backgrounds and businesses of all sizes produce their best work with incredible content and innovative tools, all on one platform. With over 1 billion images, video clips, and music tracks downloaded by nearly 1 million contributors from around the world, Shutterstock is one of the top stock creative companies in the industry.

04. Burst by Shopify

Price: Free

Burst by Shopify offers stunning photos for websites and commercial use. Their image library includes thousands of high-resolution, royalty-free images that were shot by our global community of photographers. Originally built to provide designers, developers, bloggers and entrepreneurs with access to beautiful free stock photography–you can use these pictures for just about anything: your website, blog or online store, school projects, Instagram ads, facebook posts, desktop backgrounds, client work and more. All of the photos from the platform are free for commercial use with no attribution required.

05. NegativeSpace.co

Price: Free

Each of the high-quality photographs you find on NegativeSpace.co has been taken by a photographer from the NegativeSpace community. Because they want to give their visitors easy access to beautiful, high-resolution photography, all of the photos on the site are free. Free in cost, as well as free to use under a Creative Commons CC0 license.

06. Vecteezy

Price: Free; $9+/mo

Helping designers worldwide make their best work, Vecteezy offers fresh photography and vector illustrations by a fantastic creative community and worry-free licensing. There are millions of free and paid resources, as well as new content that is added daily. Best part? They are able to work with any budget. While you can still download photos, videos, and templates for free – their Pro plan allows you to see some more unique images and videos.

07. Freepik

Price: Free; $12+/mo

Freepik is a platform that is growing every day with the goal to offer the best high-quality content: illustrations, photos, icons, mockups, and presentation templates. With multiple features available within the one platform, Freepik is a great resource for end-to-end creative solutions.

08. Pixabay

Price: Free

Pixabay is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing royalty free images, videos and music. All content is released under the Pixabay License, which makes them safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist — even for commercial purposes. You will see some overlap of Pixabay and other free resources for stock photography. However, we love their gif and illustrations!

09. StockSnap.io

Price: Free

Whether you’re building a business website, creating a print brochure, crafting a digital or magazine ad, or some other brilliant creative project, you know that a great image helps your content transcend “good” and become “great.” Compelling, eye-catching, attention-grabbing work on the web especially needs sharp, arresting visual images to succeed. That, in essence, is why StockSnap exists. This site offers beautiful, high quality stock photos for just about any use you can think of — including commercial usage — for free. No tricks, no gimmicks, no fine print; just dazzling images for your creative projects.

10. Envato Elements

Price: $16.50+/mo

If you’re trying to find something unique, we suggest checking out Envato. Their library of photos, video, and any element you can think of for your marketing needs is probably there. The filter system to finding images is great and a professional’s best friend when keeping your marketing in mind.