21 Best sites for Royalty-free stock images

Royalty-free refers to the right to use copyrighted material or intellectual property without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use or per volume sold, or some time period of use or sales. In photography and the illustration industry, it refers to a copyright license where the user has the right to use the picture without many restrictions based on one-time payment to the licensor. The user can therefore use the image in several projects without having to purchase any additional licenses. Here in this article 21 Best sites for Royalty-free stock images listed; Read on:

21 Best sites for Royalty-free stock images

1. Shutterstock 
Shutterstock is the top provider of digital imagery licensing, operating in up to 150 countries and 20 languages. It keeps a collection of up to 50 million royalty-free stock photos, vector graphics, and illustrations, and 2 million video clips and patches of music for license. The platform licenses images, video clips and pieces of music on behalf of photographers, designers, illustrators, videographers and musicians adding 40,000 new images per day from 60,000 contributors in 150 countries.

2. Stock Photo Secrets 
Stock Photo Secrets  platform allows you download free from almost 3,000,000 graphics, vectors, icons, buttons, images and more. Here, you can download 5 images, vectors, icons and more free per day. You just need to reply to the first email and request the free trial. It doesn’t restrict you and you can use the free downloaded material forever almost everywhere.

3. Big stock
Bigstock comes with high quality assortment imagery, which is available for almost any purpose at reasonable price. The platform offers up to 25 million royalty-free photos, vectors, and illustrations from ace photographers and artists around the world. Bigstock’s monthly and annual subscriptions are great ways to save if you have high-volume image requirements. And if you are familiar with your needs for images then Bigstock makes it easy, clear and adds stock photos regularly to the collection photo library.

4. Deposit photos
Deposit photos is an affordable, new-fangled and increasing stock photo platform that appears to be quickly achieving market share. DepositPhotos is working with an extensive array of stock image buyers and making sure that they have a subscription option that suits your stock image buying requirements and budget. Depositphotos offers up to 25 million images that are added on weekly basis. These images are royalty free and extended licenses only.

5.  iStockphoto
iStockphoto comes with a large assortment and a is in the leading online stock images companies. It allows you, after subscription, to download any file type ranging from stock photos, video, audio, illustrations, and vector files. Here, you can download  250 files per month. It allows you access to all image types including photos, vectors, audio and video.

6. 99club 
99club offers you get 200 XL royalty-free stock photos or vectors to utilize for any project or marketing stuff costing you less than $0.50 for each photo. Here, you can download as many as or as little of your 200 images in any size from small to XXL without any monthly download caps. However, if you need more than 200, you need to pay only $0.99 for each extra image, forever.

7. 123RF 
123RF is a digital media library offering 24 million royalty-free high resolution commercial and editorial images. There are two different subscription options; the basic plan allows 5 downloads per day at a cost of US$199 for 90 days, while the premium plan allows 26 downloads per day for US$589 for 90 days. Alternatively, single-content sales with no daily limit are available with on-demand credit packages.

8. Fotolia 
Fotolia has one of the biggest collections around; 28 million+ stock photos available. Fotolia is free to register, which gives access to all its royalty-free images with worldwide licenses that never expire. Payment plans include a pay-as-you-go option starting at £0.54 per credit or a variety of daily subscription packages offering up to 25 downloads per day from as little as £0.15 per image.

9. Dreams time 
Dreams time is one of the world’s leading providers of free and royalty-free stock images, with a collection of over 23 million photos & illustrations. Its database is renewed with thousands of fresh images on a daily basis, all of which can be viewed by signing up for free. To download photos you must purchase a ‘pay-per-download credit package or a time-based subscription plan, allowing a certain number of downloads daily.

10. Think stock 
Think stock offers millions of premium art-directed & user-generated royalty-free photos, vectors and illustrations from over 40 collections. Fresh images are added to the site every day, so there is a constant supply of new content for all types of projects. Among its range of subscriptions is one that can be paid in 12 monthly installments of US$199, offering 25 downloads per day.

11. Getty Images  
Getty Images has allowed people to embed & share many of its images for non-commercial use on websites, blogs and social media channels free of charge. Embedded images include the latest news coverage from around the world, plus Getty’s immense digital photo archive.

12. Free images 
Free images offer over 400,000 high-quality, hand-picked stock photos, all available for free to registered users. Images are suitable for almost any purpose, including desktop wallpaper, blogs or commercial websites, and are grouped into 15 categories to make searching simple.

13. Matton
Matton Images has 13 million photos in its collection from many of the world’s best royalty-free image suppliers. Images are available for every taste and budget. Many images can be purchased individually, and there are also 2.9 million high quality images available as part of a longer-term subscription.

14. Photo-case 
Photo-case has a selection of creative photos available to purchase for royalty-free use in commercial and personal projects including websites, book covers and ad campaigns. There are currently almost 300,000 photos online, which can be viewed by registering for free. To buy and download a photo, users can purchase individual items starting at US$3.60, download a credit package or take out a subscription.

15. Flickr
Flickr has millions of photos offered under one or more Creative Commons licenses, including ‘attribution’  and ‘non-commercial’. You can browse or search through content under each type. Yahoo owned Flickr service allows you to embed image and embed images as default gallery slider.

16. Mooch
Mooch Images is a royalty-free stock photography resource dedicated solely to travel images. All of its photos are closely edited to ensure they are of high quality, and using them is a breeze with instant individual pricing, online purchasing and immediate download. Once registered, image watermarks can be deactivated allowing an unhindered view of the image before purchasing.

17. Photogen 
Photogen offers totally free, premium quality, high resolution stock photos and images for designers, graphic artists, bloggers or anyone else who needs an image to enhance their commercial or personal project. The Photogen collection is regularly updated with new images, and there is a useful search facility featuring categories such as objects, nature, places and animals. Best of all, no registration is required to download and use images.

18. Dollar Photo Club 
Dollar Photo Club is a members only club offering access to 25 million high resolution, professional-quality images. Members pay $10 a month for access to the images, which are all royalty-free and available for any project or document with no limits on time, region or print runs. As the name suggests, images cost just one dollar to purchase, and around 100,000 are added to the collection every day.

19. Free range 
Free range allows registered users to download free high resolution stock photos for use in commercial or personal projects. All images are at least 2400 x 1600, and go through a rigorous quality control process before being posted on the site. Freerange is a photographic community supported by advertising revenue, so photographers get paid when users click on the ads that appear next to their submissions.

20. Free Digital Photos
Free Digital Photos offer you to choose from thousands of free stock photos and illustrations for all types of business, personal, charitable or educational uses, including book covers, websites, advertising materials, magazines and newspapers, and ebooks. All images are of high quality, and can be downloaded without registration.

21. Good free photos
Good Free Photos is a gallery of thousands of unique and free public domain stock photos. All photos are well categorized by location, species, objects for other photos. All photos are released under the public domain license so you can use the photos for whatever reason you want. Goodfreephotos does not claim to have model releases for photos that may need them.

So which service you gonna use; don't forget to mention :)

Here in this post (73 awesome free stock photo resource) larger better Royalty-free stock images sources listed, you might wanna check it out too.