21 Free Places to Get Photos for Church Promotions

In an increasingly visual society, our church communications have to stand out.

Recent statistics show:

1. Content with a relevant images gets read 94% more than content without relevant images. (source)
2. We retain only 10% of what we hear 3 days later, but when paired with a relevant visual we retain 65% of it 3 days later. (source)

Keeping that going takes a large pool of images. Between announcement slides, emails, social media and print, it’s easy to go through a stack of photos every week.

A subscription to a stock photo library is a great place to start, but it gets expensive fast. With that in mind, I’ve put together a list of sources for free photos your church can use in their communications.

Each site functions a bit differently, so be certain you read about the usage rules and restrictions.

21 Sources for Free Church Photos

1. Pixabay – login using your FB credentials for access to the library
2. Picjumbo– free photos for commercial and personal work, beware the ads
3. Unsplash – free high-resolution photos, 10 new photos every 10 days
4. Public Domain Archive/ – public domain images
5. Gratisography – quirky, stylized images
6. Free Images– overseas collection, some images feel too European to work but others are good
7. Stock Photos for Free – login using your FB credentials for access to the library
8. CompFight – check the copyright permissions on the images you chose, some require attribution to the artist
9. Jeshoots – collection is good but currently fairly small
10. Snapwire Snaps free high-resolution photos, 7 new photos every 7 days
11. Skitter Photo– license free, high quality photos
12. Startup Stock Photos – use the archive link at the top middle of the page to see the full library
13. ISO Republic – high quality, free photos for creatives
14. Designers Pics – free high-resolution photos, no attribution required
15. Splitshire – great images but the ads are annoying
16. Kaboom Pics – new pictures daily, nicely cataloged and easily searched
17. Life of Pix – all images are public domain, from Montreal so some images  contain French signage
18. Morguefile – free images plus ability to search major stock photography sites from the same window
19. Flickr – check the copyright permissions on the images you chose, some require attribution to the artist
20. We Function – download a set of images based on theme
21. Pexels.com – 50 new photos a day

Bonus Image Collections

1. Photo Pin – quickly search a millions of images from across the web
2. Bible Places – high resolution photos of Biblical location
3. Freely Photos – totally free high quality Christian stock photography
4. Magdeleine – hand-picked free images
5. Sitebuilder Report – single search pane for images from 27 differnet websites
6. Vecteezy – vector and jpeg resources
7. Flat Icon – vector based icons in Photoshop and Illustrator formats

I’m always looking for other resources for free church photos. If you have something to add, let me know in the comments below.