Food photography is an important part of every restaurant’s website, social media design and marketing material. Good food is what attracts most people to a restaurant in the first place. However, most restaurant owners don’t have the photography skills, equipment or money to produce high-quality food photography for their restaurant. While a photo-shoot by a professional photographer can cost thousands.
Fortunately there are several free stock food photography websites available to restaurants. In this article, we’ve put together a list of 20 different websites that provide free stock food photos that you can use for your restaurant’s website or social media marketing.
Pixabay
Pixabay is a community of creative people who have shared over 1,120,000 copyright free images and videos. All images are safe to use without permission or giving credit under Creative Commons CC0. While a search function is included to find specific photos, you can check out their food/drink category here.
Unsplash
Unsplash has over 200,000 free high-resolution photos that are taken by their community of photographers. All photos are free to use for both commercial and noncommercial purposes.
Vecteezy
Vecteezy is a collection of high quality photography with worry-free licensing for personal and commercial use. With millions of free resources, simple licensing, and fresh content added continuously, you should be able to find what you need at Vecteezy.
123RF
123RF has recently added millions of free high resolution stock content to their library of royalty-free digital stock images. Featuring an accurate and robust search engine, with relevant keywords, it’s easy to find exactly what you’re looking for. In addition to photos, 123RF also offers 500,000 unique vectors and 3D illustrations for personal and commercial use, video footage, audio, and more coming soon with 10,000 unique files uploaded every month.
Pexels
Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos. They currently have over 30,000 free stock photos while adding at least 3,000 new photos each month. All photos are tagged and easily searchable to find exactly what you’re looking for.
Burst
Burst is a collection of free stock photos powered by Shopify. All photos are offered under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0). You are free to use the photos for any purpose necessary without attribution. Check out their popular food photography collection here.
Free Food Photos
Free Food Photos provides a selection of quality food photography. The site was born in 2013 when two food lovers realized that there was a lack of food photography with ‘good taste’ available online. Their aim is to solve that problem.
StockSnap
StockSnap curates a collection of the highest quality images from a pool of submissions. All of their photos are free to download and do not require attribution.
Foodiesfeed
Foodiesfeed is a resource of naturally looking food photos that are completely free to download. Food photographers from all around the world share their photos under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license.
Stockvault
Stockvault is a free stock photo community where photographers and artists share their own photos with the world. The collection of over 112,000 photos are completely free to download.
ISO Republic
ISO Republic provides free stock photos for creative professionals. Over 2,500 high quality images have been published, with more being added each and every day. Check out their food category here.
Negative Spaces
Negative Space gives photographers a platform where they can share their photography with the world. All photos are high-resolution and free to use without attribution.
Picjumbo
Picjumbo is a free stock photo site created by photographer Viktor Hanacek. All pictures are free to use and have been downloaded more than 5,000,000 times.
Kaboompics
Kaboompics is a royalty-free service for stock images. There are over 5,000 images ready for you to download and start using.
Shot Stash
Shot Stash is a collection of free stock photos with no royalties or fees. New images are added every day to the site.
Stock Free Images
Stock Free Images is a project that was created to feature content donated by Dreamstime contributors for free download. Some images may require attribution.
Skitterphoto
Skitterphoto was launched by amateur photographers in 2014. Good quality free photos were hard to find so they started sharing their own. Photos are published under Creative Commons (CC0).
Life of Pix
Life of Pix is a collection of free high-resolution photos with no copyright restrictions. Images are free for personal and commercial use.
Gratisography
Gratisography displays free high-resolution pictures that you can use on personal or commercial projects. New pictures are added to the collection weekly and free of copyright restrictions.
Freepik
Freepik is a leading search engine of free high quality graphics including photos, vectors and PSD files.
While having your own food professionally photographed is always recommended, stock food photos can save you a lot of time and money. Use stock photos while you’re waiting to do your own photo-shoot or in marketing materials that require large high-quality images.
There is no shortage of options out there. You’ll be able to find almost any food dish that you can imagine. While stock photos used to have a bad reputation, that’s simply no longer the case. These resources curate photos from some of the best photographers in the world!
