5 free websites to find quality visuals for your PowerPoint presentations

If you already use sites like Shutterstock, Getty Images or Adobe Stock on your team, but photos of office workers with their best smiles, thumbs up, and eyes in the camera don't appeal to you, this article is for you (if these photos are good for you but you just don't have the budget to buy them, don't go away just yet, you might find something you like a few lines down)!

We have all used photos found on Google Images in a presentation at one time or another, but it should be noted that in addition to their generally poor quality (low resolution or excessive compression of the image), they are very rarely free of rights. That's why the sites I'm going to present to you offer excellent visuals, free of charge, and totally free to use in your presentations, including for commercial purposes.

Unsplash

Created in 2013, Unsplash is probably the best known platform offering free royalty-free photos. With a selection of more than 2 million photos submitted by 200,000 professional and non-professional photographers (as well as some brands like Harley Davidson, Le Creuset or the UN), it is still the site I use the most for my presentations. All the visuals on the site are grouped under a single license(https://unsplash.com/license).

Pexels

If you knew Unsplash, Pexels will probably be familiar to you too, since it is one year younger than Unsplash and has established itself as quickly as its predecessor in the design community. Based on the same principle as Unsplash, Pexels has a great advantage: it also offers videos. But be careful not to abuse it and end up with 500mo .pptx files.

The Pexels license is just as simple as its rival's, adding a few points that are more common sense than real prohibitions.

Rawpixel

Rawpixel is a slightly more restrictive platform to use since it requires you to create an account with which you will be able to download 10 images per day from the "Free" category (and the images from the "Public Domain" category without restriction). You will not have access to the Premium category which requires a subscription, but if I chose to present you this site despite these constraints, it is because it is one of the few to offer transparent png's, vector illustrations and psd mockups for free, under the same license as the photos and therefore free to use for commercial purposes without attribution (still for the visuals of the "Free" category).

Pixabay

Pixabay offers content that is closer to the traditional paid stock photo sites (Shutterstock, Getty, etc.) but entirely free and royalty-free. You can find photos, vector files, illustrations and some videos, but it stands out especially for its royalty-free music section, which the other sites do not offer. All under a unique license like Unsplash and Pexels.

Burst

Burst is a platform launched by the e-commerce CMS Shopify, originally to offer photos oriented for entrepreneurs starting their business, even if there is now a selection of more classic photos. Once again, all the photos are grouped under a single license.

Bonus : Everypixel & Stock Up

If you didn't find what you were looking for on these 5 sites, maybe you'll find it on Stock Up or Everypixel. Indeed, these sites are not strictly speaking platforms of provision of photos, but indexers of other sites such as those mentioned above. It is Stock Up that made me discover Burst, it's up to you to discover your own nugget!

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