Stock image websites offer a number of benefits for the users who need photos for their projects.
Most importantly, stock images are licensed for use in outside projects, which cannot be said for images you would find in Google images or other image searches.
Here you go
Why do I recommend that site? Because of a number of reasons, the most prominent of them being that Freerange Stock does complete justice to its name. All photographs on this website are really free to be used and downloaded. Photos can be used in both commercial and noncommercial projects, which cannot be said for all free image sources.
They don’t even require you to give author credits. You can credit the photographer whose image you are using if you want – always appreciated – but that’s not mandatory. This is different from other free stock websites, which impose strict requirements in this regard.
The free photos on the Freerange site are pretty big – all images are at least 2400×1600, so they can be used in print as well as web projects. There are tens of thousands of images which can be easily searched. Many of the images are exclusive to Freerange and cannot be found on other sites.
So if the images are really free to be downloaded how do they afford to keep the site going?
Freerange Stock’s income comes from Google AdSense and a search affiliation with the major microstock site Shutterstock.
Freerange Stock has come up with a unique revenue sharing model. Instead of paying the contributing photographers, they ask them to submit their AdSense ID. Then Freerange Stock’s website ensures that a particular photographer’s ads are displayed next to his profile, his images and on some other places of the website. Then the money generated through these ads is credited directly into the respective photographer’s account.
The website is pretty easy to use – if you have used a search engine before you will face no difficulty in using this website. Just go on the home page and enter the keyword you want to search.
The site will then display you with lots of results related to your search.
Let me demonstrate this with an example.
I went on the home page and entered the keyword “nature” as I wanted some nature based images and I was presented with the results shown below.
As you can see from the image above, the search returned the top 340 photos (there are actually many more results for this broad search, but the results are limited to 340 at a time), separated into 17 pages.
Freerange has partnered with Shutterstock and hence the top three images displayed are from the Shutterstock website. The remaining images on the page are from Freerange Stock itself.
If you like an image from Shutterstock you can click on it and you will be taken to their website where you can purchase that image. Images from Shutterstock are not free, but they have millions of choices.
Alternatively if you like an image from Freerange Stock, you can click on it and you will be taken to the download page. There you can register for a free account and once you sign in you can download that image and start using it.
The website is worth checking out. Go and take a look and then let me know what you think in the comments below.
UI/UX Consultant, Photoshop, XD, SketchApp, Product Designer, Website Designer, Mobile App Designer, Expert WordPress Developer. For web/mobile design and wordpress development related projects please contact me at dibakar@themepurpose.com
