5 of Our Favorite Online Photo and Image Resources

We’re all looking for high-quality stock images from time to time, whether it’s for webpages, presentations, video or social media. And today there are so many options. Shutterstock alone has 162 M royalty-free images. But as you can guess, all of us at MZ have specific insights and recommendations about online image resources for photography and images. Today we’re sharing our top 5 favorite online photo and image sites.

The Workbook

“The Workbook started out as just that, “a workbook” for art directors to find and hire professional photographers and illustrators before advent of computers and the Internet. Art directors and designers still use The Workbook to look for certain photographic styles that photographers specialize in, like fashion, industrial, product photography and so forth.” — Paul Zwief, Creative Director.

Today there are more than 35,000 people in the Workbook Directory that specialize in different types of photography, illustrations, stylists and motion designers. It remains a solid source of inspiration.

Media Militia

Patrick Blend, Art Director and Photographer, favors Media Militia when it comes to free stock photography and images. In his free time, Patrick can often be found behind a camera taking his own photographs, but he utilizes Media Militia to jump start his creativity. The site contains a plethora of image packs that have a common theme, such as: textures, lighting effects, shapes, texts, watercolors, tracings and various images. Patrick also recommends their free tutorials on Photoshop as a resource for learning how to enhance images in many different ways.

Pixabay

Jason Walz, Art Director and Motion Designer, uses Pixabay as his go-to site for more than 1.1M free stock photography, illustrations, videos, and vector graphics. With Jason’s expertise in motion design, he enjoys Pixabay because it's a great source for downloading unique and special stock videos shared by the site’s creative community. The site features an easy-to-use navigation bar and advanced search options, allowing searches for media based on categories, size, color and even orientation.

The Noun Project

“The Noun Project is a great resource for all types of icons. Whether we are building an infographic with a need for many icons or just looking to communicate a single idea or building our own custom icon from multiple reference icons, it is a powerful place to start” — Paul Zwief, Creative Director.

With over a million curated icons from a global community of artists, The Noun Project prides itself in having “Icons for Everything.” As a resource, it allows the user to select from a variety related icons, some “ready-to-use,” while others are customizable to match your project’s theme style or color. These icons can be used in a variety of marketing projects, especially as easy-to-read symbols are becoming even more important in today’s world of quick communication.

Picjumbo

MZ also recommends Picjumbo as an easy starter site for free stock images. There are over 1500 photos in the free version, which includes no download limit and no forced subscribing. The categories are broad, easy to locate and high quality. You can even chose to receive free stock images in your inbox.

Here at MZ, visuals are integral to our work and our ability to distinctively position brands and products. Whether we are creating a presentation, website, trade-show booth or brochure, we are constantly sharing photography and image sites of interest with one another. We thought you’d appreciate the share as well.