Just like trying to find timeless content ideas, finding that right image – specifically, an image that is both free and royalty-free – can be a challenge. It’s an essential part of the process, of course; after all, nobody wants to be accused of ripping off someone’s picture. Yet it can create a headache if you don’t know where to look. Fortunately, there are several awesome sites that you can visit to pick up free images for your WordPress blog. These sites, like the ones that follow, have strong reputations for being user-friendly, built for efficiency, and having a multitude of options.
Best Free Image Gallery Plugins for WordPress. We made deep research on the subject and pick 10 best image gallery plugins for you. NextGEN Gallery. NextGEN Gallery is the most popular plugin to display photos in WordPress. It’s downloaded more than 1 million times so far. Find the best free stock images about wordpress. Download all photos and use them even for commercial projects.
Royalty-free refers to the right to use copyright material without the need to pay for a license. This doesn’t always mean attribution-free, but it does mean free of cost! Check out this amazing tool and 10 websites below where you can find free royalty free images. These are listed in no particular order.
Where to Find Free Images for WordPress in 2019. Royalty-free refers to the right to use copyright material without the need to pay for a license. This doesn’t always mean attribution-free, but it does mean free of cost! Check out this amazing tool and 10 websites below where you can find free royalty free images. First, you need to edit the post or page where you want to add the image gallery. On the post edit screen, click on the Add New Block icon and select the Gallery block. This will add the Gallery block to your WordPress editor where you can click on the ‘Upload’ button to upload photos from your computer. Mar 27, 2020 Image Gallery by Ape is another cracking free WordPress gallery plugin that will beautifully decorate your websites and blogs. And it is one of those plugins that supports both image and video content. You can now craft intriguing galleries that will keep your visitors around for longer.
Before we dive into a list of some great free photo sites, Expert World Travel has created a really cool tool called Free Photo Finder. It allows you to input the search term for the photo you want, and then sort all the sites according to the license types (CC0 – public domain, Commercial use allowed, Other). When you click on the site it fills in your search term automatically. Pretty handy and definitely one you want to bookmark!
Originally started as a side project by a failed startup, Unsplash has been one of the fastest growing high-resolution photo sites on the web. It now boasts over 200,000 that are both royalty-free, attribution-free, and can be used for commercial use.
Unsplash
StockSnap.io adds new high-resolution images each week. All photos on StockSnap fall under the Creative Commons CC0 license. That means you can copy, modify, distribute any photo on the site, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.
Pexels was founded in 2014 and has a collection of over 30,000 photos, which are free for personal and commercial purpose. You can modify, copy and distribute the photos without asking for permission (which means no attribution). They are constantly adding new photos at over 3,000 per month.
Pexels
Life of Pix takes a unique approach. Free high-resolution photos are added on a weekly basis from their network of photographers. If you want stunning photos, this is definitely one to check out! And of course, they have no copyright restrictions and can be used for personal and commercial use. Photographers can also join and submit their own work.
The concept of Creative Commons is an intriguing augmentation to traditional copyright laws. In essence, a CC license allows the creator of an image to grant the public permission to share and use their work based on their own conditions. The result is a greater range of share-based flexibility for both the creator of the image and the WordPress blogger that wishes to use the image.
Flickr Creative Commons
The best way to see this process in action is to go to Flickr’s Creative Commons section. From there, you will see a host of versatile image options that are available for usage. The images themselves are marked by easy to understand symbols that are designated for certain usage categories, including:
There may be an occasion where you just need to use a photo that is public domain. Wikimedia Commons, which is a project of Wikimedia Foundation, is an excellent source for those kinds of images, as most of the photos, drawings, and illustrations that are housed on this particular site all fall into that public domain category.
That being said, there are some images that are on here that do contain a creative commons license requiring proper photo credit given when the image is used. Because of this, you should always make sure to read the fine print before posting it onto your WordPress blog.
StockPhotosforFree.com. What’s in a name? In the case of this website, there’s plenty. As the website implies, its pages are filled with plenty of stock photos that you can use for free.
They have a solid database of images, including several that are essentially still shots culled from HD quality videos. All you need to do is register with the website, and you are good to go.
When it comes to finding what you want on a website devoted royalty-free images, categorization is king. This is what makes this particular service from freeimages.com so attractive, as its high-quality images are separated by several niche-specific search metrics so you can easily get that one perfect image. Plus, these categories will allow you to quickly find images that may be buried deep on similar sites.
Freeimages
PikWizard is a newer site, but it contains thousands of stunning free stock photos. Everything on their site is free for personal and commercial use and no attribution is required. Whether you’re a blogger or a business, their high-quality images can make a perfect addition to your site.
Barnimages was launched in March 2015 by Igor Trepeshchenok and Roman Drits, two photographers from Latvia. They add free images every week. In contrast to the collections you might already be familiar with, Barnimages is not another aggregator. Every photo was taken by the site owners, or by colleagues whose work they respect.
You are allowed to use any of the free images published on Barnimages for commercial and non-commercial purposes.
Barnimages
There are times when a picture can tell you more about something than any words can do. Certainly, if you run a WordPress blog, you know just how important the use of images can be in order to bring whatever you are posting to life. Where do you find free images for your WordPress site? We would love to hear about it below in the comments.
If you enjoyed this article, then you’ll love Kinsta’s WordPress hosting platform. Turbocharge your website and get 24/7 support from our veteran WordPress team. Our Google Cloud powered infrastructure focuses on auto-scaling, performance, and security. Let us show you the Kinsta difference! Check out our plans
Building a beautiful WordPress website is not rocket science.
Just like how every site-owner has a unique set of goals, WordPress sites have endless possible configurations. And as a WordPress user, your main goal is to identify the perfect combination of plugins, content, and styling options for a truly compelling user experience.
In this post, we’ll take a look at the best methods to spice up your posts with image galleries.
Jump to:
Let’s get cracking!
If there’s one thing the WordPress community should be grateful for, it’s the free plugin repository that makes it easy to integrate useful features into their site.
FooGallery is one of the most popular plugins you can use to create in-post image galleries. It allows you to create beautiful, mobile responsive, and retina-ready galleries without writing a single line of code.
The fastest way to install FooGallery is through the WordPress dashboard. Go to Plugins > Add New, type in “FooGallery”, and click the Install button.
After installation and activation, you can start creating your first gallery by clicking FooGallery > Add Gallery.
Insert a title that will help you identify what the gallery is all about. This won’t be visible to users, so feel free to use any title you want.
To add photos to your gallery, click on Add Media under “Gallery Items”.
This should bring up the familiar interface wherein you can choose an image from your media library, or upload a new one by clicking the Upload Files tab.
When adding images to your gallery, pay attention to the image file’s caption and title as you can choose to display either two when users hover over them.
Once you have uploaded all the images you need, go ahead and adjust the settings as you see fit. Start by selecting a template for your gallery.
The template essentially dictates how your gallery is going to appear.
For example, the Responsive Image Gallery template shows all images as a grid that automatically adjusts based on screen size:
On the other hand, the Image Viewer template displays one image at a time while providing users with navigation buttons:
Take note that the rest of the available settings depend on your template. Some of the settings you can find are the gallery’s alignment, thumbnail size, hover effects, grid spacing, lightbox plugin, and so on.
Feel free to play with these settings until you achieve the appearance you want. A good strategy is to have the galleries open in one tab and a test page on another.
This leads to the next step – adding image galleries into posts.
There are basically two ways to add image galleries into your content: via shortcode and through the WordPress post editor.
To find the shortcode for a particular gallery, go to FooGallery > Galleries from the dashboard. Click on the shortcode to automatically copy it to your clipboard.
Next, simply paste the shortcode within the content area of any post or page. If it works, you should see a blank gallery placeholder with the shortcode displayed at the bottom.
Don’t worry – the placeholder doesn’t represent what the gallery will look like when the actual page is loaded.
The other alternative is to insert galleries straight into a post or page. From the WordPress dashboard, open the page or post you wish to use and click the Add FooGallery button in the editor.
This will bring up the “Choose a Gallery” window where you can find all the available galleries you can use. You can also create a new gallery from scratch through here.
To add a gallery, click on its thumbnail and then click the Insert Gallery button.
If you can’t find the gallery you want to use, you may have just created it from a separate tab. In which case, just click the Reload button to refresh the window.
Expandability is one of the biggest advantages of FooGallery. By going to FooGallery > Settings, you can change several aspects of how to plugin works.
For example, in the Images tab, you can adjust the thumbnail quality of galleries to a maximum of 100.
Finally, FooGallery supports a number of different lightweight extensions that add functionality. You can browse the extensions store by going to FooGallery > Extensions.
If you’re not enticed by the idea of using plugins for everything, then you may consider using built-in WordPress features instead.
To create in-post galleries without plugins, go to the WordPress post editor and click Add Media.
From there, select the “Create Gallery” option and choose the images you want to use.
Once you have all the images selected, click the Create a new gallery button.
This will bring you to the Edit Gallery window where you can specify the order of the images, the number of columns you wish to use, and the gallery’s size.
Don’t forget to write a suitable caption for each image to give users a bit of context. You can also modify the linking behavior of each image.
Set this to “None” if you don’t want your gallery to be interactive in any way.
We have now explored two of the most popular options for adding in-post galleries to WordPress posts.
To give you even more flexibility, here are a few other alternatives to FooGallery you can consider:
Site: huge-it.com/portfolio-gallery/; Price: Free / $40 for 1 site
Portfolio Gallery is part of the Huge IT WordPress plugin ecosystem. It’s an easy-to-use plugin that lets you create highly interactive galleries with multiple views, including full-height blocks, content slider, elastic grid, and lightbox gallery.
Site: www.imagely.com/nextgen-gallery/; Price: Free / $69
In terms of active installations, NextGEN Gallery is at the very top with over 1 million users. The only reason why FooGallery is featured in this post is its steep pricing. It also has a more elaborate settings section that can be a little confusing to new users. Nevertheless, it is a solid plugin that can help you create beautiful and responsive galleries.
Site: web-dorado.com/wordpress-instagram-feed-wd; Price: Free / $25 for 1 site
You can easily use Instagram Feed WD to pull content from your Instagram account and into a customizable gallery.
This is perfect for photographers and bloggers with an established Instagram presence.
Found everything you need on how to create in-post image galleries? Don’t forget to check out the essential WordPress plugins that every site should have!