At Lightboard we live and breathe marketing design, and that means we’ve spent hours sifting through cheesy, expensive, and not-so-great stock photography to find the diamonds in the rough—authentic, fresh stock photos.

That’s why we’ve decided to share some of our favorite under the radar resources for free, amazing stock photos. Sure, Pexels and Unsplash are great—but they're going to be on every list of free stock photography. As for paid stock, we enjoy Deposit Photos and Adobe Stock.

This list is for those of you that have already been there and done that. At the time of publication, each of these sites allows modification and commercial use of their images, but double check when you download.

Burst

Shopify created this collection of stock photos specifically for entrepreneurs. The images are e-commerce focused, but you don’t have to be a Shopify customer to use them.

Fancy Crave

Fancy Crave aims to provide “non-cheesy” stock photos by providing emotionally driven images to aid in storytelling. They upload new photographs every day.

Foodiesfeed

Hungry? Then you may not want to click this link until after you’ve eaten. Foodies Feed has thousands of stock photos, all food and cooking related.

Freerange Stock

Freerange stock offers thousands of images taken by an in-house team or contributed from a growing community of photographers. Each image is curated, cropped, and color-corrected for the highest quality.

New York Public Library

From stereoscopic landscapes and maps to photos and restaurant menus, the New York Public Library offers over 180,000 (!) items in their digital public domain image collection.

Picjumbo

Created by designer & photographer Viktor Hanacek when a regular stock photo site rejected his photos. Within two years visitors had downloaded more than two and a half million of his images—not too shabby!

Startup Stock Photos

Startup Stock Photos’ mission is to provide writers, developers, and entrepreneurs access to a library of beautiful, usable, and free “startup-focused” images.

Styled Stock

Styled Stock offers stock photography with a self-professed feminine look. Each of the images is highly styled and would work great for blog header images, PowerPoint cover slides, and display ads.

Bonus round: New Old Stock Photo, Death to Stock, and, for those of you looking for something best described as "quirky," Gratisography.

Before digging through these sites, you might want to check out our guide to picking the right photo for your project and take a look at these six things to think about when choosing a photo.

Need help incorporating some of your new finds into your marketing design? We're here to help. We've designed thousands of projects for companies large and small. See what we can do.

And finally: