The 5 best sites for free images for PowerPoint presentations

Using quality visuals is one of the main drivers of how impactful your presentation will be. If your slides are just walls of text, your audience will struggle to stay engaged throughout your talk.

If your team already uses sites like Shutterstock, Getty Images or Adobe Stock, but the photos of office workers grinning with thumbs up don't speak to you, this article is for you. And if those photos are your style but you simply don't have the budget, keep reading — you may still find what you're looking for.

We have all grabbed an image from Google Images at some point. On top of generally low quality (low resolution or heavy compression), those photos are rarely royalty-free. The sites below offer excellent visuals, completely free to use in your presentations — including for commercial purposes.

Unsplash

Launched in 2013, Unsplash is undoubtedly the best-known platform for free, royalty-free photos. With a library of over 2 million photos from 200,000 professional and amateur photographers (plus a few brands like Harley Davidson, Le Creuset and the UN), it's still the site I use the most for my presentations today. Every visual on the site falls under a single simple license.

Pexels

If you know Unsplash, Pexels will feel familiar — a year younger, it earned its reputation in the design community just as quickly. It works on the same principle as Unsplash, with one major advantage: it also offers videos. Just be careful not to overdo it and end up with 500MB .pptx files.

Rawpixel

Rawpixel is a slightly more restrictive platform — it requires you to create an account, which lets you download 10 images per day from the "Free" category (and unlimited images from the "Public Domain" category). I chose to include it because it's one of the few sites that offers transparent PNGs, vector illustrations and PSD mockups for free — all under a license that allows commercial use without attribution required.

Pixabay

Pixabay offers content closer to traditional paid stock sites (Shutterstock, Getty, etc.) but completely free and royalty-free. You'll find photos, vector files, illustrations and some videos, but it really stands out for its royalty-free music section, which the other sites don't offer. Everything is under a single license, just like Unsplash and Pexels.

Burst

Burst is a platform launched by the e-commerce CMS Shopify, originally focused on photos for entrepreneurs starting their business, although today there's a selection of more classic photos too. Again, all photos fall under a single license.

Bonus: Everypixel and Stock Up

If you didn't find what you were looking for on these 5 sites, try Stock Up or Everypixel. They aren't strictly photo platforms but indexers that surface content from other sites including those above. Stock Up is actually how I discovered Burst — it's up to you to find your own gem!

Conclusion

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