We’re constantly scouring the web to find the best free stock image websites for your church use. Be sure to check out of definitive guide to free church media.
We ranked these sites on the following categories:
- Church Life, including scenes of worship and study groups.
- Christian Art, which we felt was typified by stained glass.
- Prayerful Imagery, including people in prayer, and spirit-filled images.
- Christmas/Easter – Images that showed the Christian rather than the commerical message.
- Diverse People – We looked for images of real people engaging in a variety of diverse tasks.
1. UNSPLASH (Score 25 out of 25)
Unsplash is an industry-leading photography resource being used by millions worldwide. You’ll find thousands of quality images for hundreds of search terms. Unsplash will recommend similar search terms to find additional photos. Licensing: Over 200,000 free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos brought to you by the world’s most generous community of photographers.
2. Pexels (Score 17 out of 25)
Pexels is another free stock photo site that offers thousands of high-quality images. Unlike some of the other sites, Pexles also provides a great selection of free videos and a search-by-color option. Licensing: It’s hard to understand complex licenses that is why all photos on Pexels are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. This means the pictures are completely free to be used for any legal purpose. The pictures are free for personal and even for commercial use. You can modify, copy and distribute the photos. All without asking for permission or setting a link to the source. So, attribution is not required.
3. Pixabay (Score 14 out of 25)
Users can find free church-related stock photos on Pixabay. The real gem in this website is its collections of free videos, illustrates and vector images. These are all available with the creation of a Pixabay account. Licensing: All contents are released under the Pixabay License, which makes them safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist.
4. Visual Hunt (Score 14 out of 25)
VisualHunt has a trendy interface and a great selection of quality free stock photos. VisualHunt allows users to search for images based on color and license type. Licensing: Most of our photos are CC0 license (do whatever you want).
5. StockSnap (Score 13 out of 25)
Though StockSnap does not have the selection of the previous stock photo sites it still has a good sampling of stock photos for church use. StockSnap allows users to search based on views, downloads and trending in addition to relevance to the search term. Licensing: All photos on StockSnap fall under the Creative Commons CC0 license. That means you can copy, modify, distribute any photo on the site, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission!
6. CreationSwap (Score 13 out of 25)
CreationSwap is a great collection of free and paid content specifically for churches, created by the users. Unlike other free stock photo sites CreationSwap has church-specific graphics and sound collections. Users will need to create an account to access content. Licensing: Images have a specific CreationSwap Licensing that is more complicated than the other sites listed in this post. Read more here.
7. Freephotos.cc (Score 13 out of 25)
FreePhotos.cc organizes free photos by clever categories in addition to their search function. FreePhotos.cc has a neat photo editing tool within the site that allows users to do basic editing functions, but it also has fun features such as applying filters and stickers. Licensing: FreePhotos.cc is a free resource where you can find creative commons photos for your website or print projects.
Other sites that didn’t make the cut.
There are literally hundreds of free photo websites, so we obviously didn’t look at all of them. Others we did evaluate which you may find useful include: OpenChurch, Barn Images, Free Range, Little Visuals, New Old Stock, Superfamous, Startup Stock Photos, Gratisography, Get Refe, Jay Mantri, Magdeleine, Travel Coffee Book, Moveast, Shot Stash.