Are you looking for high-quality material that you can use commercially without having to worry about any copyright violations? Well, you came to the right place. In this post, we will be going over 10 websites that offer royalty-free resources that you can use, whether it was an image, a vector, or a graphic.
What is royalty-free material?
Usually, whenever someone publishes a piece of work, they own the rights for this work and you are not allowed to publish it for commercial use or redistribute it. However, there are some intellectual property labeled as royalty-free which means that you do not have to pay royalty for them and are free to use commercially.
List of royalty-free websites with high-quality images
Pexels
The first item on our list is Pexels. If you want to get free videos and images, you can check this website out. You have the ability to filter resources by category, and you can also download images at predefined sizes, or set your own custom image size. In regards to videos, you can download them at different qualities with a simple button click.
FreePik
Next up, is FreePik. This is one of the websites that provide both premium and free options. For this post, we will be talking about the free service which allows you to download the following resources:
- Vectors
- Photos
- PSD
- Icons
Before surfing FreePik, let’s go over the limitation that it enforces on free users.
- Downloads are limited, however, this goes back to whether you are logged in or not. Guest users get 3 downloads per day, whereas logged-in users get 10.
- Some resources require a premium subscription before you can download them.
Similar to Pexels, you can download images at specific sizes, but you do not have the option to download at custom sizes.
Cleanpng
If you are looking for transparent background images (.png), you can use cleanpng. Simply use the search form on their site and that is pretty much it.
Icons8
This website will provide you with a lot of tools ranging from icons and photos to illustrations and music. However, in this article, we will be covering the photos part of Icons8. Basically, it is everything you expect from a stock image website, however, they have one nice tool called Mega Creator that allows you to create your own image from a bunch of PNGs and download it in the size that you want.
Vecteezy
If you want to download videos for royalty-free use, Vecteezy will help you do just that. You can download Vectors, Photos, PNGs, and videos. All while being able to filter out the assets with an advanced filter that supports color picker so that you can pick the perfect color for your image. Using it is pretty straight forward, simply head over to the website and search any term you need.
unDraw
unDraw is a bit different than the other websites that provide free resources on this list. With unDraw, you can download characters as SVG or PNG format, and you can even adjust the colors of the art works on the fly before you download them. So your illustrations can be made ready to match your design. If you like the project and want to support it, unDraw has an option to pay 49$ per month to get access to their premium tools which include
- Illustrated icons
- Duotone photos
- Designer photo optimization
- On-brand covers
- Email code generator
- Illustration 2.0
Free3D
Yet another unique take on free resources is Free3D. A website that offers you an option of both free and paid 3D models that you can use in different formats. The formats that this website provides are:
- Blender
- Cinema 3D
- 3ds Max
- Maya
- FBX
- Obj
One of the uses of 3D assets is to create great animations, and when it is combined with threeJS, you can bring those 3D models to life using JavaScipt. Even though those assets are a bit more advanced to implement on your website, when you use WordPress, you can find some free plugins that make this integration seamless.
Humaaans
This website is something similar to unDraw which allows you to download character designs. The unique feature of this website is that it allows you to mix and match different parts of a character like head, pants, shirt and more so you can get the perfect character design.
Even though this is a free tool, the option to support the designers is your choice to make once you download the product.
Font Awesome
Want to use icons on your website? Font Awesome has 3,000+ icons that you can use. The options with this tool are endless as not only can you use different variations of an icon that range from thin to bold, but you can also download your icons in different formats, either in CSS or SVG. Everything on Font Awesome is pretty organized that allows you to search for the perfect icon and embed it directly to your website.
A paid option is available for Font Awesome, however you can also go for the paid version to get an even bigger range of icons for you to use.
Bensound
Apart from videos, images, vectors and icons, music can be royalty-free as well so you can use on your promotional videos, social media, and much more. Bensound allows you to download music tracks ranging from a couple seconds to a few minutes long.
