Good images and graphics for social media and your website

Whether for social media or your own website: good images and graphics are important. In this post, you’ll learn how to find good images and graphics easily and free of charge, and how to quickly optimize them for your specific use case. I’ll show you the services and tools for free images that I use myself.

To generate attention for your content on the internet, good images or graphics are a key foundation. It doesn’t matter whether it’s stock photos for your own website, images for posts on your online blog, or visuals for social networks like Facebook, Instagram, etc.

Up front: of course, you can always create images and graphics entirely yourself — with your own camera or in a drawing program. That’s explicitly not the topic here. We want to get high-quality graphics and images for a wide range of topics quickly and with little effort. We also want to be able to adjust them if needed.

For example, by cropping part of an image, adding text to photos, or placing a gradient or shadow over specific areas of an image.

Free graphics and images

There are several services on the internet that provide hundreds of thousands of images for free. In some cases, using them requires a link attribution; in other cases, even that isn’t necessary. As a rule, these services offer a search function and the ability to filter content by terms or categories (e.g., photos, drawings) to find the right image. Below I’ll introduce a few services for free graphics and images that I use myself.

Pixabay

Pixabay provides nearly 2 million images and videos. You may use all Pixabay content for free, for commercial and non-commercial applications, in print and digital. You don’t need permission from either the image author or Pixabay, and a source reference isn’t required. There are, however, some restrictions. It’s best to read the current Pixabay License before using the service.

Pexels

Pexels likewise permits free use of photos and videos. Attribution is not required, and the content may be altered and edited as you wish. Some restrictions apply here, too. Therefore, take a look at the current Pexels License before using the service.

Unsplash

Unsplash has more than 1 million images on offer. You may use Unsplash photos for free, including for commercial purposes. Attribution is not required but appreciated. You can find the exact terms in the Unsplash License.

Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons is a vast repository of over 90 million freely usable media files, including photos, illustrations, and videos. It’s a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, the same organization behind Wikipedia. The files are contributed by volunteers and organizations worldwide and are typically licensed under Creative Commons or public domain.

While you can download and use most content for free — even commercially — it’s important to check the license for each file. Many images require proper attribution, and some have additional conditions such as sharing derivative works under the same license. Wikimedia Commons is especially valuable for historical images, scientific diagrams, cultural photography, and niche topics that are hard to find on commercial stock sites.

Using AI tools for image generation

In addition to stock image services and traditional design tools, AI-powered image generation has become an increasingly powerful option. Platforms such as DALL·E, Midjourney, and Adobe Firefly allow you to create unique visuals simply by describing them in text. These tools can generate photorealistic scenes, illustrations, or stylized artwork that would otherwise take hours to produce manually.

AI tools are especially useful when you need images for highly specific scenarios where no stock photo exists, or when you want to create a consistent style across multiple graphics.

However, always check the license terms for AI-generated images, as some platforms impose usage restrictions, especially for commercial purposes.

Simple and fast online image editing

With Pixabay and Pexels you now know the two services I use most often for free images and graphics. Now I’d like to show you the one service I use to combine the selected assets into a finished design in no time: Canva is an online image-editing service that is really easy to use and with which even beginners can achieve impressive results in a short time.

Canva works in your web browser or alternatively as an app on your smartphone. There are many ready-made templates that make creating a design even easier. There are also many presets for different purposes — for example, a template with the perfect image size for an Instagram post or a Facebook cover.

The best thing to do is sign up for Canva and try it yourself. It’s a really creative process, and personally I find it a lot of fun to create great designs so easily.

Closing thoughts

If you have great photos or images of your own, consider uploading them to Pixabay, Pexels or Wiki Commons and making them available to others. I’ve already uploaded many photos there, and it’s a surprisingly rewarding feeling to know they might be helping someone else — perhaps appearing in a blog post, a presentation, or even on the homepage of a small business somewhere in the world.