Luckily for social media managers, stock photo websites have improved dramatically in recent years. Just a few years ago, you could hardly use stock photos on social media because they looked like cheesy, staged images like this:
While these images are still available on photo sites like BigStock, I would be curious to know who is actually using them. From a social media marketer’s perspective, I can’t imagine staged stock images performing well on any medium.
Consumers are savvier than ever and authenticity has become increasingly important. With the rise of influencer marketing, the bar for social media photography has been set almost impossibly high. Audiences want to see a brand’s product being used in a way that is believable and relatable so they can picture themselves using the product, too.
Photos by Julia Engel, Gal Meets Glam
For this reason, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend using stock photos on image-centric platforms like Instagram, but sometimes it can be our only option if a client hasn’t provided imagery or signed up for our photography or influencer marketing services. In this instance, it’s important to crowdsource beautiful, high-resolution, lifestyle images from stock photo sites that could pass as photos taken by the brand.
I surveyed the Genies and asked for some of their favorite stock photo websites and they suggested the following websites. To highlight some of the photos they share, I typed in the word “food,” on each tool. Here are some of the results.
Pexels
Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos licensed under the Pexels license. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable and also easy to discover through our discover pages. They have hundreds of thousands of free stock photos and every day new high-resolution photos will be added. All photos are hand-picked from photos uploaded by our users or sourced from free image websites. We make sure all published pictures are high-quality and licensed under the Pexels license.
RESULTS FOR “FOOD”
PRICE: FREE
Foodie’s Feed
Food photographers from all around the world share their photos under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license to help accomplish the ultimate goal of Foodiesfeed, to make the online space related to food more beautiful and eliminate all the ugly sterile stock photos that people still keep using.Whether you’re a hobby or professional photographer, food blogger, passionate foodie or there are just some food photos hanging in your cloud drive that could be used by other modern creatives, join the community and help us with our mission.
RESULTS FOR “BURGER”
PRICE: FREE
Every month, over 70,000 people from 209 countries visit Kaboompics, a royalty-free service for stock images I created. To this day the site has gathered over 6 million impressions, and the photos have been downloaded over 4 million times. Additional 2 million downloads have been generated by other websites where I put my photos (like Pexels and Pixabay). Since the inception of this site, my inbox received several thousands of messages and tweets, full of praise for my work.
RESULTS FOR “FOOD”
PRICE: FREE
850,000+ photos for your next project. With a huge library of photos and thousands more being added each day, chances are we’ve got a photo for you. Find inspiration in the new photos we hand-select every day or use our search to find and download exactly what you’re looking for.
RESULTS FOR “FOOD”
PRICE: FREE
Millions of high-quality images, graphics, videos, 3D objects and templates.
Unable to search without signing up.
Price: US$29.99/mo
