Free stock photos

Free stock photos can be used for a wide variety of projects, including social media posts, videos, ads, and films. They’re perfect for everything from personal use to school projects to more advanced professional or commercial work. Our stock photos are high in definition and quality, looking great on your phone screen and the big screen alike.

Here, you can find stock photos of many different subjects, including nature, women, men, occupations, products: whatever you might need. You’ll find stock photos in both portrait and landscape orientation to fit the limitations of your particular project.

For success using stock photos, here are some tips and tricks to follow.

• Try different options. Not sure which stock photo you like best of several choices? Download them all and put them in your project to see them in context before making a final decision.
• Try different search terms. If you don’t initially find the stock photo you’re looking for, try making your search more specific or more general. For example, if you’re looking for a photo of a beach landscape, you can try just typing “beach” if you’re flexible, or be more specific with a search like “sandy beach at sunset.”
• Don’t be afraid to modify the photos you choose. Cropping, filtering, and resizing are all great ways to make a photo fit your project. 

Stock photography originated in the 1920s and 1930s as photographers began working with stock photo agencies to make extra money. This was an important development in the still relatively new photography industry, as the idea of turning a photograph into a product for purchase was quite innovative.

Seeing the potential of this budding industry, Otto Bettmann began to collect photographs as a financial investment, eventually immigrating to the US in 1935 with a collection of 15,000 photos to sell, organizing them with a card index as a library of photos.

This was highly useful to publishers, advertisers, and designers, who could simply buy photos from the Bettmann Archive instead of taking them themselves or paying a photographer a high premium for an original photo.

While the photography industry as a whole has been changed completely by the invention of digital photography and the internet, today’s stock photo libraries – like ours – are similar in many ways to Bettmann’s original archive. 

And while many online stock photo libraries continue to sell their photos as a product, there are also resources like Createlist.io that prefer to make their photos available to audiences for free. This significantly democratizes the content creation space, giving access to an important creative asset to people who would otherwise not be able to afford it. 

At Createlist.io, we believe that the world is better when artists get to create with as few limitations as possible. That’s why all of our stock photos – and other resources such as stock footage and video templates – are 100% free. Use them for your school projects, your first short film, to advertise your small business, or anything else you can dream of.