igh quality images are an important element of every successful website. I would always recommend having personalised photographs and images where possible, showing you, your workplace and tools, your customers and anything else that may be of interest to your potential customers. Helping your visitors to understand who you are, what you can do and what you’ve already done helps to build trust, and people only buy from people they trust. Commissioning a professional photographer doesn’t always cost as much as you’d think and the results will always be better than those of an amateur, even with the development of high quality point-and-shoot camera equipment.

If you don’t want, or can’t afford, to spend money on a photographer or stock images, you have a few options available. Take photographs yourself, ask a friend who’s an enthusiastic amateur photographer, or try and find an image that is free and legal to use. Finding these can be tricky. Licensing and copyright information can be difficult to establish when looking through Google images and it’s not worth getting the wrong side of a legal battle over copyright, so I’d stay clear of these altogether.

So where can you find images that you can can legally use for free? Here are the best resources that I’ve found in my search. It has to be said that for some of these resources, the quality of the images might not be quite as good as those found on websites that sell them. That’s not true of them all though, there are still some great, high quality images available for free.

So here they are, my top 5 recommendations. Make sure you read and understand the terms and conditions of these resources before using any of their images.

• MorgueFile [https://morguefile.com/]
• FreeImages [https://freeimages.com/]
• Pixabay [https://pixabay.com/en/]
• Unsplash [https://unsplash.com/]
• Death to the Stock Photo [https://join.deathtothestockphoto.com/]