“Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.” – Walt Disney

A relevant and enticing image adds immense value to your presentation or website. But getting an artist or illustrator to do a job for you involves a lot of time and money. Fortunately, there are many stock art websites out there, where you can find any number of quality images, photos and illustrations that suit your requirements.

But before we get there, it’s important to understand the different licensing options as any violation can put you in a legal hot soup. Each image has embedded information and online tools can easily detect licensing violations.

Most stock websites offer the following types of licences:

Royalty-Free – You pay the initial licence fee once and then can use the image multiple times and forever in a wide range of permitted uses.

Extended/Enhance – This licence gives you greater freedom over image uses restricted by a royalty-free licence.

Rights Managed – Gives you rights to use images in a specific way depending on parameters that can be modified to suit your requirement

Creative Commons – It is a non-profit organisation providing free, easy to use licences for sharing and use of creative works. You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work even for commercial purposes. The licence is usually termed as CC0 (Creative Commons Zero)

Here’s our digital creative team’s top picks for websites for free images. Some of the images in these may have licensing agreements, so it’s important to understand the restrictions on each image before you use them.