4 Places to Source Free or Low-Cost Images for Your App

While Googling free images to use on your new app makes sense in theory, it’s a common mistake that many small businesses make when looking for professional imagery.

A little-known fact is that these “free” images are often protected by copyright, while the quality of the imagery displayed in the search results can vary hugely.

Use our recommended list below of the best free-to-use image sites so you can be completely confident that the app images used on launch are not going to land you in any trouble where copyright is concerned.

1) Pexels

With around 10,000 images uploaded by a range of talented creators, Pexels has imagery to suit all app design styles, ranging from the avant-garde to emotional stimulating black and white stills.

Pexels is a great choice for mobile platforms aimed at younger demographics, such as youth fashion brands or those with a significant social media presence.

2) Pixabay

If you’re looking for a wider selection of free-to-use imagery, Pixabay gives you access to over 2.3 million stock images, vector graphics and illustrations to really bring your app to life.

All images are shared by a talented creator community through Creation Commons CCO (meaning you can enhance, reuse and modify for commercial purposes).

3) Unsplash

With a strapline on the homepage of “the internet’s source of freely usable images’, small businesses, app developers and marketers are able to browse through an extensive library of high-res images quickly and easily here.

Unlike Pixabay, the licensing covering these images is similar to CCO but with a few added restrictions, although many of these shouldn’t apply when sourcing photos for your new small business app build.

Don’t forget, you can also mix and match images from each of these sites to fill out your app and create a visually appealing aesthetic.

4) Kaboom Pics

As with Pexels, there’re over 10,000 high-quality free images to choose from on Kaboom Pics, with the selling point of this site being that colour palette codes are provided next to every image downloaded.

This means that you can choose images directly aligning with your brand’s chosen colour scheme from their website for example and can really help when choosing the right imagery to match with the existing look and feel of page designs.