Pixabay and 6 More Epic Free Stock Photography Sites for Teachers

Stock photography is an important resource for teachers because it helps them enhance their lessons with vivid and pertinent images, make classroom materials more interesting, better illustrate concepts, and create multimedia presentations for the classroom. 

However, working with a limited budget means paying for high-quality images is out of the question, as they range from $15-150 each. Searching for high-resolution photos in the public domain is time-consuming, which takes away from teachers’ valuable planning and grading time.

Here, we cover six free stock photo sites that offer royalty-free images without copyright restrictions, so you can easily bookmark this post to find them quickly when you need stock photography for educational use.

Best Free Stock Photography Site with a Variety of Media

Pixabay

Pixabay offers free stock photos and a variety of other media, such as videos, illustrations, clipart, and vectors, that are 100 percent free, even for commercial use. No attribution is required, so you do not need to credit a photographer or designer for images you use from Pixabay. 

The site’s collection is vast and covers a wide range of topics, so you can search for anything you’re covering in class and be relatively certain to come up with at least a few options. The site is user-friendly, with a simple search bar and filters that allow you to select from various media options.

Best Free Stock Photography Site for Backgrounds and Wallpapers

Unsplash

Unsplash's vast image library contains over six million high-resolution images and illustrations created by top-quality artists. It is best known for its rich, vibrant images suitable for backgrounds and wallpapers. 

If you’re looking for extraordinary new photos for your classroom website, this is the ideal place! You can browse the site’s full library of images or select a specific category, such as nature, street photography, people, or others. 

For teachers, enter search terms like students, teachers, classroom, art supplies, books, and learning for an outstanding selection of assets to use in your next project!

Best Free Stock Photography Site with Images and Videos Shared by Creators

Pexels

There is a reason Pexels gets more than 18 million views per month! The images and videos shared by photographers and visual artists make this stock image site worth visiting. 

One great feature is the ability to group photos and videos into collections. This handy tool organizes photos on the site and makes them ready for later use.

Collections can be organized by lessons, projects, or topics, providing an intuitive way to quickly find the photo collection you need!

Best Free High-Resolution Stock Photography Site 

Gratisography

This photography site is known for its high-quality images and the whimsy infused into each one. Gratisography's distinct style makes it particularly useful for teachers of lower grades. 

Using fun, entertaining images helps capture and maintain children’s attention, which is essential for the best learning experience and outcome!

This website is also a great resource for teaching digital fluency to young children by allowing them to search for fun images to create their own mini-projects.

Best Free Stock Photography Websites and Social Media Pages

Kaboompics

Every photo on Kaboompics is free to download and use under the website’s license, so you never have to worry about whether a photo can be used on your website, social media page, or classroom materials. 

What makes Kaboompics unique is that each photo is accompanied by its own photoshoot! When you search for an image on a topic, you receive a selection of photos. By clicking on one, you can view the entire photoshoot related to that image. 

Additionally, you can choose a color palette that’s perfect for Instagram. If you’re a teacher who enjoys showcasing your classroom on social media, that’s a fantastic way to do it! If you’re a teacher who loves templates, a color-coordinated Instagram palette is a feature you will appreciate.

Best Free Stock Photography Site for Backgrounds and Photos

Picjumbo

Picjumbo offers free images, backgrounds, photos, and wallpapers on their easy-to-search website. With a quick search, you instantly see how many images are available on Picjumbo that meet your criteria. Additional search tips prompt you to refine your search for more targeted results.

If you need more than one image for your project, the download screen displays related free images with every search. A helpful categories dropdown menu displays some of the most-searched topics to make it easy to find what you’re looking for or to get inspiration. 

Best Free Stock Photography Site for Vector Graphics and Videos

Vecteezy

Vecteezy offers a wide range of stock photos, videos, graphics, and more. The website provides preloaded categories that make searching easy. For example, you can browse by content type (e.g., vectors, templates, and videos).

Alternatively, you can check out one of the preloaded categories displayed on the site’s home page, such as popular images, the current week’s trending images, or popular vectors and graphics.

Vecteezy also offers a Canva-style template resource for designing flyers, brochures, certificates, and more.

More Online Image Resources Teachers Love

Sometimes, you cannot find what you need on a free site. For those times, you can turn to reliable paid sites like these to meet your needs for images and other graphics for your classroom.

Getty Images

As the worldwide leader in visual content, Getty Images boasts the largest collection of stock images—over 500 million! In addition, Getty has nearly 300 million historical images available on its platform.

Getty offers multiple options to fine-tune your search, from filters to auto-generated terms that may help refine your results. 

Getty Images pricing ranges from $199 to $499 per download, depending on the image size; however, they offer significant savings through bundles of five, ten, and fifteen image packs. 

For example, if you purchase a 15-pack of medium images, each image costs $240 versus $399 if purchased as single images. 

iStock

Established in 2000, this image supplier, along with Getty Images, constitutes 85 percent of the online image market.

In addition to stunning images, iStock boasts thousands of illustrations, diagrams, videos, and vectors. By searching for topics you teach, you can easily enhance classroom content and almost guarantee to find useful additional content.

iStock offers three plans: Basic, Premium, and Premium plus video. They cost $29, $45, and $99 monthly, respectively.

Adobe Stock

With over 300 million images, music tracks, videos, and more available, it’s nearly impossible not to find what you’re looking for on Adobe Stock. The site utilizes cutting-edge AI technology to help you customize searches and results faster than ever before. 

Adobe offers annual and monthly plans that range from $29 to $249, depending on the number of assets used. Additionally, a one-time purchase is available through the website's credit packs program.

Finding quality images and other digital assets for your classroom materials and lessons is a breeze with these excellent free stock image sites. If you can’t find exactly what you need there, Getty, iStock, or Adobe will surely have it! Now, all that’s left to do is enjoy browsing through dozens of stunning images for your needs.