6 Best Sites for Free & Low Cost Art & Photos Online

Great photography and art is all over the internet, but finding images in high resolution without paying through the roof for the royalties is an art form unto itself.

If you are looking for high resolution art to use for print that is royalty free and creative commons zero then you have come to the right place. We have curated a list of the 6 best websites to find royalty free, high resolution art and photos that you can use for any personal or commercial art project.

Without further ado I present the following sites:

Unsplash (Free)

This is all user generated content (UGC) that unsplash updates on a daily basis. The quality of photography on this website is out of this world, and it feels more like an art gallery website than a stock photo site. Everything you find on here is suitable for large prints.

Pexels (Free)

This site feels more like a traditional stock photography site than unsplash, but it is awesome in the way it provides artwork. Pexels crawls all of the known free stock photography sites and compiles images to give you the most comprehensive and search friendly offerings for free stock photography online period.

Shorpy (Low Cost)

All good things in life are not free, and historical photographs are one of those things, but if you are looking for historical photos online then this is one of the best all encompassing resources out there. Their website reads more like a blog with little anecdotes about each image, but that is also what helps it make this list despite not being free.

Awesome Art (Low Cost)

Ever wonder where sites like allposters.com and art.com get the rights to all of the famous images you see on their websites. Welcome to Awesome Art, for about $20 you can order collections of high resolution royalty free artwork from Rembrandt to Hiroshige.

Public Domain Review (Free and Low Cost)

As the name suggests this website curates historical artwork that has become public domain, but may be a little too obscure for a site like Awesome Art. This site feels more like a museum with full essays about the work represented. The amount of work on this site is almost overwhelming, but it is all available in some way or another online. A lot of the collections are submitted by museums and libraries from all over the world.

Wikimedia Commons (Free)

Yes the largest online encyclopedia has over 37 million royalty free images to use for whatever purpose you need.

These are the sites we use the most often, but that isn’t to say that there aren’t other options.

If you can’t find what you are looking for, feel free to contact us and give us an idea or concept and let us do the legwork. We work with countless historical societies and other stock photography websites to find something suitable for print for our clients' walls on a daily basis.

Once you find what you are looking for upload and order it in print at Stretch and Staple for the best reproduction possible.