Every online store needs pictures it didn’t shoot. Background textures, lifestyle shots, the photo at the top of a blog post, the banner on a category page. Hiring a photographer for all of it isn’t realistic for a bakery or a flower shop, so most of it comes from free stock libraries.
The trouble is that “free” covers at least four different legal situations, and they are not interchangeable. Some images are free to use commercially with no credit. Some are free only if you credit the photographer. Some are free for a blog but not on a product you sell. And some are free right up until the person in the photo objects. This guide covers where to get free stock images for ecommerce, what each licence actually permits, read from the licence pages themselves rather than from memory, and the specific ways sellers get caught out. For the photos of your own products, which are a different job with different rules, see our guide to building product pages that convert for local delivery.
The Bottom Line
- The four big free libraries (Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay and Shopify’s Burst) all allow commercial use with no attribution required, but each one bans a different set of uses.
- Every one of them forbids selling an unmodified image as the product itself: a print, a poster, or a mug with the photo on it.
- “Ethically sourced” means more than free. It means the photographer consented, anyone recognisable in the frame consented, and you can prove where it came from.
- Creative Commons is not one licence. The NC and ND variants make an image unusable for a commercial store, and they look identical to the permissive ones until you check.
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What makes a stock image ethically sourced
An ethically sourced image clears three separate hurdles, and a free download only clears the first.
The photographer agreed. The image was uploaded by the person who made it, to a platform that grants you a licence. An image you found on Google Images or lifted from a competitor’s site has cleared nothing.
Anyone recognisable agreed. A photograph of a person used to advertise a business normally needs a model release. Stock platforms handle this inconsistently, and the responsibility usually lands on you.
You can prove it. Six months from now you need to be able to say where an image came from. Keep a spreadsheet with the image file name, the source URL, the licence, the photographer’s name and the date you downloaded it. This takes ten seconds per image and is the only thing that makes a copyright complaint a quick conversation rather than a long one.
That third point matters more than it used to, because platforms change their terms. A licence you relied on in 2022 is not necessarily the licence that applies to a download made today. That is why every claim below was checked against the source’s own licence page in September 2026.
The best free stock image sites for e-commerce
Four libraries cover the vast majority of what a small online store needs, and all four permit commercial use without credit. The differences are in what they forbid.
Unsplash grants “an irrevocable, nonexclusive, worldwide copyright license to download, copy, modify, distribute, perform, and use images from Unsplash for free, including for commercial purposes, without permission.” Attribution is encouraged but not required. Two things are out: images “cannot be sold without significant modification,” and the licence “does not include the right to compile images from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service.”
Pexels also states plainly that “attribution is not required,” permits modification, and allows commercial use including ads and e-commerce. Its restrictions are the most specific of the four. You may not show identifiable people “in a bad light or in a way that is offensive,” may not “imply endorsement of your product by people or brands on the imagery,” may not use a photo “as part of your trade-mark, design-mark, trade-name, business name or service mark,” and may not redistribute or sell the images on other stock platforms.
Pixabay lets you use content without attributing the author and modify or adapt it into new works. Its sharpest restriction is about brands: you cannot use content featuring “recognisable trademarks, logos or brands… for commercial purposes in relation to goods and services,” which rules out a lot of otherwise useful lifestyle photography. Pixabay also puts the burden on you explicitly: “it is your responsibility to check whether you require the consent of a third party or a license to use Content.”
Burst, run by Shopify, lists “20,000+ Free Stock Photos and Royalty-Free Images” shot by its photographer community. Attribution is appreciated but, in the site’s own words, “it is not mandatory under our image license.” Burst is the most permissive of the four for a seller, because it explicitly addresses commerce: “You can use these free photos on your online store, product packaging, or anywhere else you’d like. You can even use these pics to create t-shirts, mugs, or other products.” It’s also organised by business category, which makes it faster to search than the general-purpose libraries.
How the four free licences compare
| Source | Attribution | Commercial use | Notable restriction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unsplash | Not required | Yes | Can’t resell without significant modification; can’t rebuild a rival library |
| Pexels | Not required | Yes | No implied endorsement; no unaltered resale on physical products |
| Pixabay | Not required | Yes | No commercial use of images containing recognisable brands or logos |
| Burst | Not required | Yes | Explicitly permits store, packaging and merchandise use |
Openverse is a different kind of tool: it searches across openly licensed image collections rather than hosting its own. Its terms page returned a 403 when we tried to fetch it in September 2026, so we’re describing it only as a search index, which is the important caveat with any aggregator anyway. Openverse doesn’t grant you a licence; the original source does, and you have to follow the link and read it.
Creative Commons licences, decoded
A large share of “free” images online are Creative Commons rather than platform-licensed, and CC is six different licences wearing similar names. For a store that sells things, the difference decides whether you can use the image at all.
- CC0 places the work in the public domain. The creator waives their rights and the work can be used without restriction. This is the safest thing you can find.
- CC BY permits distribution, remixing, adaptation and commercial use, provided credit is given to the creator.
- CC BY-SA is the same, with one addition: your adaptations must be shared under the same terms. That can be awkward for commercial design work.
- CC BY-ND allows commercial use of the unmodified image with credit, but no edits or derivatives. Cropping it to fit your banner may breach it.
- CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA and CC BY-NC-ND all carry the NonCommercial condition. A shop that sells products cannot use them, full stop.
(Creative Commons, retrieved 2026-09-24.)
The practical rule: if the licence string contains NC, walk away. If it contains ND, you can’t crop or edit it. Everything else is workable as long as you credit the creator where the licence asks for it.
Where free stock images get e-commerce sellers in trouble
Four traps account for most of the trouble, and none of them involve downloading from the wrong site.
Putting the photo on the product. All four major libraries forbid selling an unaltered image as the item itself. A photo on your homepage is fine; the same photo printed on a tote bag you sell is a licence breach under Unsplash’s “significant modification” clause and Pexels’ ban on unaltered resale on physical products. Burst is the exception that explicitly allows it.
Recognisable people. A model in a stock photo consented to being photographed. Whether they consented to fronting your business is a separate question. Pexels bars showing identifiable people offensively or implying their endorsement; Pixabay bars immoral or illegal use of content featuring recognisable people. If a photo of a person is going anywhere near a sales claim, either verify the release or pick a different shot. Check where else that face already appears online before you build a campaign around it. A reverse face search tool like Lenso.ai will show you which pages a given portrait turns up on, which is a fast way to spot an image that a competitor has already made their own.
Visible brands and logos. This one catches food and retail sellers constantly, because the most appetising lifestyle photos tend to contain a branded cup, a labelled bottle or a phone with a recognisable interface. Pixabay’s licence bars commercial use of images with recognisable trademarks in relation to goods and services. Crop them out or move on.
AI provenance. Generated images now appear throughout free libraries, sometimes labelled and sometimes not. The legal position on the training data behind them is still unsettled in several jurisdictions, and a generated image can’t come with a model release for a face that doesn’t belong to anyone. For decorative backgrounds this is low risk. For anything that implies a real customer or a real result, don’t.
When to shoot your own product photos instead
Stock has a hard ceiling: it cannot show your product. For anything a customer is actually buying, the photo has to be the real item, because a stock croissant on a bakery’s product page is a small lie that the delivery then exposes.
Use stock for the surrounding furniture: blog headers, about pages, category banners, the texture behind a promotion. Use your own camera for every product shot, every packed-order shot and anything showing your premises or your team. A phone camera by a window beats a beautiful stock photo of somebody else’s shop, and it’s the only version that survives contact with the customer who opens the box.
Making a free stock image fit your product page
Most stock photos arrive in the wrong shape. A library image is usually 3:2 landscape; your category tiles probably want 1:1 and your banner wants something much wider. Cropping loses the part of the picture that made you pick it.
Three fixes, in order of how much you should reach for them. Re-crop deliberately, deciding what the tile actually needs to show rather than centring by default. Shoot or source a version with deliberate empty space around the subject, so you have room to crop in several directions. Or extend the canvas with an AI tool that generates the missing edges: Picsart’s AI image extender takes an uploaded image and fills in beyond its original boundaries using aspect ratio presets, so you can change the shape without squashing or cutting the subject. It’s freemium. The page offers “a limited amount of free expands” before a subscription is needed, which is enough to reshape a handful of hero images.
Whichever you use, keep one crop ratio per position across the whole store. A category grid where every tile is framed differently reads as unfinished however good the individual photos are.
Frequently asked questions about free stock images for e-commerce
Can I use free stock photos on a commercial online store?
Yes, on all four of the major free libraries. Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay and Burst each permit commercial use without attribution. The limits are on specific uses (resale of the unmodified image, implied endorsement, and images containing recognisable brands) rather than on commerce itself.
Do I have to credit the photographer?
Not on Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay or Burst, all of which state attribution is appreciated but not required. You do have to credit on any Creative Commons licence that includes BY, which is all of them except CC0.
Can I put a free stock photo on something I sell?
Usually not. Unsplash requires “significant modification” before an image can be sold, and Pexels prohibits selling unaltered copies “as a poster, print or on a physical product.” Burst is the exception and says outright you can use its photos on packaging and merchandise.
What does “ethically sourced” actually mean for images?
That the photographer granted the licence, that anyone recognisable in the frame consented to commercial use, and that you have a record of where the file came from and under what terms. Free and ethical are not the same test.
Is it safe to use AI-generated stock images on a product page?
For decorative use, generally yes. For anything implying a real customer, a real result or a real person, no. A generated face carries no model release, and the provenance of the training data behind these images is still contested.
Start with a source list, not a search
Pick two libraries and stay in them. Burst for anything commerce-shaped, Pexels or Unsplash for lifestyle and texture, and Creative Commons only when you’ve read the licence string. Log every download with its source URL and licence as you go.
That’s ten seconds per image and it removes the single most common reason small stores end up with a takedown notice: nobody can remember where the picture came from.
