IMAGES OPTIMIATION

If you have ever searched for a good stock image for a blog Guest .images site . Poster or anything you know the struggle is real. The image that catches your eye is never free. And by now, you have probably realized that we have to shell out an excellent amount to download a single image.

Well, if you need high-quality stock photos on a regular basis, it is helpful to subscribe to one of these sites, like Shutterstock or Getty Images. But what if you simply need just a handful of images once or twice a year? Paying a whole year’s subscription fee, in that case, is definitely not worth it.

LUCKY PICS

Luckily, there are a few free stock image sites that offer excellent image for absolutely no fee. They have enormous collections, and most times, you’ll find precisely what you are looking for.

In this blog, we have listed 7 of our favorite sites that we use for our own professional endeavors.

All of these sites have the Creative Commons CC0 license. Which means that you can download the image and use it for personal or professional reasons without crediting anyone.

Pixabay

Pixabay is a cult favorite and rightly so. Check out all the image sites featuring the best site for free stockimages, and you’ll see Pixabay perched on the top always. This site offers over one million high-quality images for you to download and use without attribution.

What’s good about  that its search category is quite advanced that most of its contemporaries. You can customize your search result by using various parameters and categories like media type, color, orientation, and size.

On top of that, if you’re feeling a bit too adventurous. Try using AND, NOT, and OR operators to build some concrete search results. Sometimes, the resolution of images is not as high as sites like Pexel. But it gets the job done for most web and print needs.

IN RANKING PEXELS IMPORTANCE

Pexels is yet another site that’s almost synonymous with free stock photos. The images available in Pexels are very high resolution, which means that you can use them in big spaces like giant prints and so on.

Many image listed here are over 10 MB in size! Moreover, they also contain information about every single image, like which camera was used to capture it and what software went into editing. Like Pixabay, Pexel’s search system is quite advanced too.

You can search using parameters like popular searchers, new photos, newly uploaded images, and popular photos. All the images are well tagged, highly searchable, and easy to discover through the discovery pages.

STOCKSNAP

Stocksnap.io may not be as big as Pexels or Pixabay. When it comes to the number of images they offer, but if there’s that one particular photo that you can’t find anywhere else. There’s a good chance that Stocksnap will help you out.

Although there are fewer images, the photos resolution is very high and is on par with Pexels. The search bar is also quite accommodating, with options like date, views, trending, downloads, and favorites. If you want to speed up the process, you can directly click on the category page and browse images that way.

While Stocksnap also displays sponsored, priced images in results. You can notice them right away due to watermarks emblazoned over the images. If you’re a travel or food blogger, it’s definitely worth giving this site a shot.

Gratisography

Unlike most sites listed here that proudly display their vast oceans of images,  has something different going on for it. Offers World’s quirkiest free stock images in high-resolution.

At , you won’t get that typical Shutterstock-vibe image. Hundreds of free photos are added weekly, and only the most interesting submissions make it to the website. The quality of images is also constant throughout the website, and most images are contributed by the site owner, Ryan McGuire himself.

Here, you can search for images by ‘new pictures,’ ‘all,’ or one of the six categories (whimsical, people, urban, objects, nature, and animals). Note: This site employs pagination, which means that you can scroll and scroll without ever hitting bottom!

FUTURE OF KABOOM PICTURE INTREST

Kaboom Pics should be your go-to site if your niche is something that’s creative, modern, or abstract-y. While Kaboom Pics doesn’t boast of a database featuring millions of images, what they lack in terms of size, they more than makeup for it with their unique photos.

You can sort the search process by using various elements like a hashtag, category, and search bar. The whole process is hassle-free with a one-click download solution, and you don’t even have to log in to download.

This site hosts excellent images, particularly for categories like fashion, food, landscape, and architecture.

NATURAL PICS

It’s only natural that we want only the best-looking photos with professionalism oozing from it when it comes to selecting photos for our website. But Get  has decided not to go by the rulebooks and also features stock photos taken.

Optimizing a page for fast load times can be divided into 3 broad categories. The basic coding of the page, the scripts used on the page, and the images. Of these three, images that are too large can have the biggest impact on load times and therefore have the most potential to improve page load times if properly optimized.

SLOW LOADING

Are you losing visitors to your website due to slow page load times? Will your site be penalize because the images on your site are too large? Are you able to grab your visitors’ attention in the first 10-15 seconds they are on your site?

Optimizing a page for fast load times can be divide into 3 broad categories: the basic coding of the page, the scripts used on the page, and the images. Of these three, images that are too large can have the biggest impact on load times and therefore have the most potential to improve page load times if properly optimized.

A Brief Introduction to Image Types

There are many image formats commonly used on websites, the three most popular are GIF, JPEG and, to a less extent, Flash content. We will limit our discussion to GIF and JPEG images, with a specific focus on still images.

Each of these image formats has its strengths and weaknesses. GIF or Graphics Interchange Format was develope by CompuServe before the advent of the Internet as a way to share images on the CompuServe service.

LIMITED SCREEN

Due to limitations with screen resolutions and color depth at the time, GIF images were limite to displaying up to 256 colors, more colors were mimick by Dithering, a process of tricking the eye into seeing one color by using 2 or more sets of color points. . Place too close together for the eye to differentiate them individually.

We will no longer be able to make out the individual squares and instead see a large gray square, the black and white squares merging in our eyes into one solid. color. This is the concept behind dithering.

JPEG FILE FORMATS

The JPEG file format, on the other hand, is a newer format that can easily handle millions of colors. The initial drawback of JPEG images is that they contain many more colors and each color requires some encoding to display, thus increasing file size.

Speed ​​up image load times

The main idea behind loading an image faster is to reduce the file size. This can be achieve in two ways. You can either reduce the size of the image or reduce the amount of encoding required to display the image.

IMAGE SIZE

The easiest way to reduce the size of an image file is to reduce the physical size of the image. In other words, the smaller the image, the smaller the file size. Imagine an image that is a square of 80 by 80 pixels. The number of pixels in the image is 80×80 or 6400 individual pixels.

This is our first principle for reducing image files: use the smallest image size that fits your design. Similarly, the fewer images on the page, the fewer image pixels, so the smaller the page size will be.

Image formats

Since GIF and JPEG image formats use different methods to store image information. They tend to display some types of images better and others worse.

GIF images, because they are limite to 256 colors per image. Better at displaying images with large blocks of solid colors and images with very small physical direction. The GIF format produces smaller file sizes than JPEG for these types of images.

Better result

JPEG images are better at showing gradients or subtle changes from one color to another. Therefore, JPEG files reproduce photos or other images with gradations very well. The JPEG format produces smaller file sizes for these types of images than the GIF format