Free Stock Photo Sites That Shut Down and Where to Go Instead

Which free stock photo sites have shut down?

Very few free stock photo sites close with an announcement. Most go quiet, get bought, change their licence or start redirecting to a paid library. We checked more than 30 once-popular free photo and video sites. The table shows where each one stood at the end of October 2026.

Status labels mean what they say. Closed means no free photos are served at the old address. Dormant means the site loads but nothing new has been added in years. Went paid means the free offer has been replaced by a subscription. Redirects means the domain now sends you somewhere else.

Quick check: A footer that says “© 2026” proves nothing. Plenty of dormant sites update the year automatically. Look at the date of the newest upload instead.

Sites that closed or now redirect

These are the sites where the original free library is no longer available at its old address.

stock.xchng and FreeImages

stock.xchng (sxc.hu) launched in February 2001 and was one of the first big free photo sites (Wikipedia). By 2009 it held more than 400,000 free images, and Getty Images bought it that July (Plagiarism Today). iStock’s COO at the time told Selling Stock that free sites were “a great marketing vehicle”, meaning a way to upsell users into paid iStock content. In August 2013, with more than 2.5 million registered users, the site went down for days behind a maintenance notice (PetaPixel). It was renamed FreeImages in 2014.

When we checked on 31 October 2026, both freeimages.com and its licence page returned a 302 redirect to the iStock homepage. We couldn’t find a public announcement or an exact date for the change.

500px Creative Commons

In July 2018, 500px closed its own marketplace, moved licensing to Getty Images and VCG, and removed Creative Commons licensing altogether. More than a million free images became impossible to search for or download on the site (The Next Web). 500px still runs as a photo community. Its free library is gone.

Nappy

Nappy built a library of free photos of Black and brown people, released into the public domain. In October 2026 it posted that it would close “in the next few months”, saying demand for authentic images “fell off a cliff” and that it wouldn’t add an AI face generator (Nappy, reported by kottke.org on 5 October 2026). Downloads stay open until the final day, and the team says photos already downloaded remain under CC0. It also asked anyone interested in taking the site over to get in touch.

Watch out: If you rely on Nappy for diverse imagery, download what you need now and save the licence page alongside the files. When a public domain library disappears, nobody can take your rights to those files away, but you’ll need the records to show where they came from.

TheStocks.im, Jay Mantri and Superfamous

TheStocks.im used to pull together photos from a list of free sites in one place. It still loads, but it has relaunched as “The Stocks 3”, a directory of more than 2,100 design tools rather than a photo aggregator. We cover what happened to each of its original sources in our TheStocks.im alternatives guide.

Two of those sources no longer offer free photos. jaymantri.com now shows one line about the photographer’s design job, and only 7 of his photos remain on his Unsplash profile. superfamous.com is now Folkert Gorter’s studio portfolio with no image library, so his CC BY nature and abstract photos are no longer offered there.

Sites that went dormant

A dormant site still loads but hasn’t added anything in years. Its downloads usually still work. The risk is that a dormant site can vanish without notice, and its licence page can go with it.

• Little Visuals offered free high-resolution photo packs. Founder Nic Jackson died in November 2013, and his family has kept the site online, with its photos marked CC0.
• New Old Stock, Cole Townsend’s collection of vintage photos from public archives, still loads on Tumblr. The newest post we found was dated 14 October 2022.
• Travel Coffee Book still shows travel photos with download links, but the newest posts are from September 2019. One download link pointed to an unrelated German shop domain, a common sign of an unmaintained site.
• Public Domain Archive says new photos are added weekly. Its newest image folders date from September 2017.
• Startup Stock Photos is online. The newest upload paths we found were from October 2023.
• morgueFile still calls itself a free photo archive, but in October 2026 its homepage mostly promoted iStock subscriptions and we couldn’t load its photo search.

Common mistake: Bookmarking a dormant site’s licence page and assuming it will always be there. Save a PDF or screenshot of the licence on the day you download, and note the date in your file name or asset sheet.

Sites that went paid or changed model

Some sites are still live but no longer offer what made them popular. Usually a free offer turned into a free trial, or AI generation tools were added alongside the photos.

Death to the Stock Photo

Death to the Stock Photo started in 2013 by emailing subscribers a free themed pack of 10 photos each month (Fstoppers, 2014). By February 2015 it also sold a US$10 a month premium library (Cult of Mac). Today the Death to Stock homepage leads with paid memberships from US$20 a month and a 14-day free trial. The free offer is now an email newsletter with “10+ free visuals”.

Picjumbo, Gratisography and SplitShire

These three are still free and still updated, with extra features:

• Picjumbo offers free photos plus a PREMIUM membership for its 200+ themed collections.
• Gratisography still offers free photos without attribution and now has an “AI Generated” collection. If you need real photography, check each image’s category.
• SplitShire calls itself a free stock photo and video platform, and now sells subscription plans for AI image, video and sound generation.

Burst moved house

Burst, Shopify’s free photo library, hasn’t closed. burst.shopify.com now redirects to shopify.com/stock-photos, and the photos are still free for commercial use without attribution under the Burst terms. If your old links break, swap in the new address.

Foodiesfeed and the free video sites

Foodiesfeed, the CC0 food photo site founded in Prague in 2014, is live but listed for sale. The listing says an eight-year Getty Images sponsorship ended in August 2026. Small free sites have often paid for hosting with sponsorship deals like that one.

Video went through the same consolidation. Freepik bought Videvo in June 2022, when it had more than 500,000 freemium clips and over 650,000 users (BusinessCloud). Freepik rebranded as Magnific on 28 April 2026, and both videvo.net and mazwai.com now redirect to Magnific’s video library. Free clips there require credit to the creator. For other free footage sources, see our guide to the best free stock footage sites.

Creative Commons Search went the same way: since 13 December 2021 it has redirected to Openverse, run by the WordPress project (WordPress Openverse team).

Big libraries that changed their terms

The largest free libraries are still running, but several have rewritten their licences over the years. A photo you downloaded in 2016 may have come under different terms from the same photo today.

Sources: Creative Commons, Unsplash License, Unsplash history, Getty Images Newsroom, Wikipedia: Pixabay, Pixabay Content License, TechCrunch.

When Unsplash left CC0, Creative Commons estimated about 200,000 images had been shared under it, and asked Unsplash to keep them marked as CC0 or publish an archive. Unsplash has grown a lot since then: from 10 photos on a Tumblr blog in May 2013 to 5 million images by April 2023, according to its own company history. When it launched Unsplash+ at an introductory US$7 a month in October 2022, it said its “open library isn’t going anywhere” (PetaPixel).

Worth knowing: Our guide to free stock photo licences explains the practical difference between CC0 and custom licences like Unsplash’s and Pixabay’s, including what each one says about reselling unaltered files.

Paid agencies that closed

Paid stock libraries close too. Their closures show what tends to happen to licences and contributors.

Sources: PetaPixel on Fotolia, Pickr on Twenty20, Wikipedia: Can Stock Photo, PetaPixel on EyeEm.

When Twenty20 closed, the library its subscribers could use dropped from more than 50 million photos to the 1.2 million Envato moved across, so fewer than 1 in 40 photos made the move. EyeEm’s closure notice was clear on one point: licences sold before images were removed remain valid.

Consolidation doesn’t always go through. Getty Images agreed in January 2025 to merge with Shutterstock. In May 2026 the UK Competition and Markets Authority said the deal could proceed only if Shutterstock’s entire editorial business was sold off, and Getty terminated the agreement on 7 July 2026 (Getty Images 10-Q).

Where to go instead

The sites below were live and adding content when we checked in October 2026. Each has a written licence you can save.

Smithsonian Open Access is a good example of a source built to last. Its images come from a public institution’s collections, and it doesn’t depend on ad revenue or a buyer. For more options sorted by use case, see our roundup of free stock images and videos for commercial use with no watermark.

Why free stock sites shut down

Free stock sites usually close for one of four reasons: running costs, falling demand, acquisition, or a founder moving on. The cases above show each of them.

Running costs. High-resolution downloads are expensive to serve, and AI scrapers have added to the load. The Wikimedia Foundation reported that the bandwidth used to download multimedia from its projects grew 50% from January 2024, and that at least 65% of its most resource-consuming traffic came from bots, which account for about 35% of pageviews (Wikimedia Foundation, April 2025). Wikimedia is a large foundation. A one-person photo site has no such budget.

Falling demand. Nappy’s closure notice blames lower demand for authentic images since generators arrived. Free sites earn from affiliate banners and sponsorships, and both depend on traffic. Fewer visitors means less money for hosting.

Acquisition. Big companies buy free libraries to send users toward paid ones. In 2009 iStock was open about stock.xchng being a “marketing vehicle”. Getty bought Unsplash in 2021, Canva bought Pexels and Pixabay in 2019, and Freepik bought Videvo in 2022 and EyeEm in 2023. Some of those libraries thrived after the sale. Others, like FreeImages, eventually ended up pointing at the buyer’s paid site.

Founders moving on. Many early sites were one photographer’s side project. When the photographer changed jobs, as with Jay Mantri, or died, as with Little Visuals’ Nic Jackson, the site stopped growing.

Rule of thumb: If a free site depends on one person or one sponsor, treat it as temporary. Download what you need, keep the licence, and don’t rely on it as your only source.

What happens to your licence after a site closes?

For CC0 and Creative Commons downloads, your right to use an image you got while the licence applied continues after the site goes offline. Creative Commons says its licences “are not revocable”: a licensor can stop distributing a work, but anyone who already has a copy can keep using it under the original terms (Creative Commons FAQ). The CC0 legal code describes its waiver as “permanently, irrevocably and unconditionally” made. Plagiarism Today’s analysis reaches the same conclusion: removing a licence can’t stop people who already rely on it (Plagiarism Today, 2014).

Custom licences depend on their wording. The Unsplash License calls its grant “irrevocable”. Other sites’ terms may say nothing either way. In paid stock, EyeEm stated that licences sold before closure stayed valid. Where a licence is silent, ask a lawyer before using the image in high-stakes work. This post is general information, not legal advice.

Your licence only helps if you can prove it. When a site disappears, its licence page usually disappears too. Keep these records for every image you use commercially:

1. The image file as downloaded, with its original file name.
2. The source page URL and the photographer’s name.
3. A dated PDF or screenshot of the licence page on the day you downloaded.
4. Where you used the image (page URL, campaign, client).

If you never saved a copy, look for an archived snapshot of the licence page on the Internet Archive from around your download date.

How to pick free stock sources that last

Choose sources with a funded owner, a written licence and a visible upload history. This checklist sorts durable sources from fragile ones:

None of these signals is a guarantee. FreeImages had a big owner and still ended up as a redirect. Spreading your downloads across two or three strong libraries, plus an institutional archive, protects you better than any single choice.

Worth knowing: Answer engines like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews tend to cite pages with current, checked facts. Saijo George, the AI SEO consultant in Melbourne who curates this site, notes that dead outbound links make a page look abandoned to readers and crawlers alike. Fixing old image credits is cheap and worth doing.

How we keep our directory clean

AllTheFreeStock has listed free stock resources since 2015, and we check and prune dead links. When a site in our free stock directory closes, goes dormant, changes its licence or starts redirecting, we update or remove its listing.

If you find a listing that no longer works, or a site that has changed its terms, let us know and we’ll check it. This post will be updated as sites change, and the “updated” date at the top shows when we last checked.

Questions you may have

Saijo George

SEO Consultant · Melbourne

Curator of AllTheFreeStock and a handful of other tools for marketers. Spends most of the week on technical SEO and the rest arguing about licence terms.

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