Where to Get Good Stock Images for Web Design | EP 773

Where to Get Good Stock Images for Web Design

1. Unsplash 00:45
2. Pexels 03:04
3. FreePik 04:01
4. Shutterstock 06:15

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 Tim Strifler: Hey everyone welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast, I’m Tim Strifler my co-host David Blackmn is not with us today, he is traveling. We couldn’t get our schedules to line up again so he’ll be back with us in a few days uh but today we’re gonna be talking about where to get good stock images for web design. Now obviously images are incredibly important when you are building a website and most of the time you don’t have really high quality custom images. Right and so that’s where stock images come into play. However stock images can really make or break your design you have really cheesy or low quality or just kind of ugly stock images or ugly images in general, it’s going to really just ruin your design. If you’ve ever started with some sort of a template child theme layout whatever and it looks really great it has really great stock images and and then you start putting in your own images and all of a sudden it just kind of breaks the design and no longer looks good. Um well, that’s the the risk. You run when when that uh building a website essentially and starting with a template but if you have really good quality stock images then you are in a lot better position to not break the design. If you’re using a ladder template and really set yourself up for Success. So whether you’re building from scratch or you’re using a template or layout or child theme whatever, um you’re going to want good high quality stock images . And so I have mostly some free options here to tell you about that. I’ve personally been using for years as well as One Premium option too so Unsplash is without a doubt the best free stock image Library out there. So it’s unsplash.com they have a pretty good search engine powered uh within so you can search for different things and um you can look at different uh images in the same series or from the same artist whatever. And so um yeah Unsplash is great they do ask you to attribute so if you use it on a commercial project to give some attribution somewhere on the site it’s just kind of courtesy for using the images for free, but yeah overall the images are high quality they’re not that cheesy stock image that uh constantly gets made fun of on the internet like they look good, they look natural, they look uh high quality. So there is definitely some not so great photos in there because people can basically photographers can upload their own photos and I don’t know if there’s any type of approval process or quality check. But um from what I’ve seen generally it’s pretty high quality stuff. Pexels is another one p-e-x-e-l-s another great free stock image Library. I don’t think it’s as good as Unsplash um but it but it is pretty decent and there also is a lot of overlap. So a lot of times the stuff that I do find that I like on Pexels is also ones Unsplashed. So most of the time Unsplashes my go-to and then I will look at Pexels occasionally um at different times if I can’t find what I’m looking at an Unsplash and every once in a while I’ll find something really good on Pexels that wasn’t on Unsplash. So um so it’s definitely worth keeping in Your Arsenal. Now the next one is not so much for typical stock images but um for graphics and uh different things like that and that’s Freepick. Freepik.com is awesome so like for example those um kind of like drawn like vector type uh graphic images of like I don’t know people working on a computer or whatever. Uh Freepick has a lot of stuff like that so they have a lot of really great vectors they do have photos too. It’s kind of Hit or Miss similar to Pexels not quite as high quality as Unsplashed kind of more of the cheesy stock uh category, but if you’re looking for for example um like a photo like of an iPhone or something you can find some really good vector graphics that that fit that. Um so yeah Freepick is great and it’s free similar to the other ones. They do ask you to attribute if you use one of their images on a commercial website but for using it for free it’s definitely worth that so that is Freepick. Now the last one here is definitely not free um and they’re definitely not uh a small company and that’s Shutterstock. They’re definitely one of the big players in the stock photo and stock graphic category but in my opinion it’s a really good value and so you can get uh basically image packs and you can get like for example I’ll do typically do the on demand because I don’t use a lot of stock images, and I’ll do like five downloads for 50 bucks or something like that. So uh you know for whatever I need it for that’s typically a pretty good value you know 10 bucks an image type of thing and so um yeah you can end up paying a lot for stock images and then obviously they have bigger packages too they have monthly packages and stuff like that so again you know you get what you pay for in general but um the free resources on Splash pixels free pick are generally pretty good and then Shutterstock is my go-to when I can’t find something that I need for free I’ll typically check out Shutterstock and then by that point I’m willing to pay 10 bucks for an image if I’ve already exhausted all my free resources. So that’s where to get good stock images for web design. Hopefully you found this episode helpful, tune in tomorrow we’re gonna be talking about what payment processor that you should use. And so we’re talking about that kind of from an e-commerce standpoint for building an e-commerce website as well as accepting payments from web design clients as well. So tune in to tomorrow’s episode for that until then take care bye.