33 Free Resources for Photos, Audio, and Video

Say you’re a videographer and need audio clips to accompany your videos. Or maybe you’re a writer looking for stock imagery to illustrate your articles. Or even still, you’re a business owner in need of imagery or videos (or both!) for a website or marketing campaign. 

Unfortunately, hiring an expert isn’t always in the budget, but the good news is that there are plenty of experts who share their high-quality work with the masses for free. Yes, for free. 

While it’s good practice to attribute the work to them, it’s not always required. With a creative commons license, the creative asset is royalty-free, meaning the creator’s right to the work is waived. However, read the fine print before downloading and using anything for your work—sometimes there are restrictions on if it can be used for commercial purposes.

We compiled a long list of resources for you to check out the next time you’re in need of creative assets for a project. With photo, audio, video, and more, we’ve got you covered.

Photos

1. Flickr's Creative Commons

Royalty-free and public domain images.

2. Pexels

Free stock images with no attribution needed that are searchable by color.

3. New York Public Library’s Public Domain Collection

More than 180,000 images you can use for free in almost unlimited ways.

4. Pixabay

Free and royalty-free stock images.

5. Unsplash

Free—and “do whatever you want with”—high-resolution photos from photographers.

6. Public Domain Images

A stock photo website that’s updated weekly.

7. Free For Commercial Use

The name says it all—a wide variety of categories of non-restricted images.

8. List by Harvard Law School Library (Images)

A treasure-trove of public domain links and resources.

9. Digginet

Even more places to find free stock photos. 

10. StockSnap

Free stock image site updated weekly.

11. Wikipedia Creative Commons and Public Domain Sites

A very comprehensive list of public domain sites.

12. Morguefile

Don’t let the creepy name throw you off. Free stock images for creatives by creatives.

13. Jeshoots

A website with free images from Jan Vasek.

14. Travelcoffeebook

A great resource for travel imagery, with a large portion from Asia.

15. Gratisography

Photos and vectors are available for use.

16. Stokpic

Watch pictures in a sort of a Pinterest setting here. A nice website with great pics—all free!

17. Vatican Library Digitization Project

The Vatican Library digitized 4,400 ancient manuscripts and is giving them away for free.

Audio

18. Flashkit.com

Free music loops for Flash projects.

19. Incompetech.com

Kevin MacLeod is the undisputed king of high-quality diverse and searchable free music loops. 

20. List by Harvard Law School Library (Audio)

Public domain audio content.

21. Free Music Archive

Original music from independent artists that are free to access and download. 

22. Bensound.com

Royalty-free music ready to download.

23. MixKit

An ever-growing audio library.

24. Free-Stock-Music.com

Exactly what it claims to be!

Video

25. Pexels Video 

A glorious collection of stock videos you can use for free in any way you see fit.

26. Vimeo Public Domain Videos

Quality varies on these videos, but it can be worth sifting through.

27. List by Harvard Law School Library (Video)

Yet another solid list. 

28. Coverr

A comprehensive collection that even includes Zoom virtual backgrounds.

29. Videvo.net

Free stock videos and motion graphics clips.

30. MixKit

In addition to audio, they have a collection of stock videos.

31. MazWai.com

This site is curated by their team and has both licensed and unlicensed videos and asks for attribution.

32. Veedzy.com

Free HD and 4K resolution videos.

Miscellaneous

33. Internet Archive

Literally a little bit of everything: books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.

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