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As a web design and copywriting duo working with fellow big-hearted business owners, we often need diverse stock images for client websites, as well as for our own blogs and newsletter: The Highly Emotional Business Owner.
In this blog, we’re sharing some of our favourite free resources for diverse stock photo collections, plus some tips for using them ethically and inclusively.
Using a wide range of authentic, diverse stock images promotes diversity and inclusion and increases a sense of belonging that makes everyone feel welcome and included. It’s something that’s mega important to us at Good Egg (and probably for you, too, since you’re reading this blog).
Need help creating an inclusive website? We’re the Eggs for the job!
Lots of traditional stock imagery of people isn’t very inclusive. It often presents a bland and narrow view of the world. Queer and gender-nonconforming people, disabled people, and people of colour very rarely feature. And that’s not a version of the world we want to see.
Thankfully, there is a growing number of collections of royalty-free, inclusive stock imagery that reflect the dazzling diversity of communities and identities worldwide.
Here are eight diverse stock sites we’ve bookmarked for whenever we need images for our website, socials, or newsletter, plus three of our other fave free stock imagery resources.
Turning fifty doesn’t suddenly mean all you can do is sit in your house and drink tea. Created by The Centre For Ageing Better, the Age Positive Image Library aims to show a broad range of “positive and realistic images of over 50s in a bid to challenge negative and stereotypical views of older age […] to help tackle ageism and challenge the idea that all older people are frail and vulnerable.”
Jopwell is a career advancement platform for Black, Latinx, & Native American professionals. To counter the lack of representation in workplace stock photos, they created The Jopwell Collection, “an album of more than 100 free-to-download stock photos featuring leaders in the Jopwell community […] at work.”
If you need photos of people working on laptops or holding meetings, The Jopwell Collection has loads!
Developed as a response to the lack of cultural representation on traditional stock photo sites, nappy aims “to provide beautiful, high-res photos of black and brown people to startups, brands, agencies, and everyone else”.
We find their Black x Tech collection useful for our work, and the Tiny Humans collection is absolutely adorable – perfect for parenting brands or family bloggers who want to prioritise Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups.
#WOCinTech Chat noticed the “huge deficit of images displaying women of color in technology” and decided to do something about it. Their #WOCinTech stock image library addresses “the problem of not having visible representations of women of color engaging in technical tasks in stock images.”
We’ve used lots of their imagery to go with our posts about websites, as they have such a variety of photos of women working on computers (aka what we also do all day).
Need a new website to fill with diverse stock images? Our Squarespace website package might be just what you need.
Technology company AllGo commissioned its own library of plus-size stock imagery, which they’ve made freely available to help increase the representation of plus-size people.
They say, “By depicting everyday activities such as making a salad or reading a book using plus-size models, we intend for images to be used by a wide variety of content creators—not just those addressing plus-size issues.” We say, “What a joyful and fun collection of images championing body size diversity”.
Grassroots advocacy group Affect runs Disabled and Here: “a disability-led effort to provide free & inclusive stock images from our own perspective, with photos and illustrations celebrating disabled Black, Indigenous, people of colour (BIPOC).” There’s a lovely mix of photos and illustrations, and they provide very detailed image descriptions for each picture.
Queer in Tech was originally created as an internal resource by the custom map company Mapbox. They decided to share the photo collection more widely “to promote the visibility of queer and gender-nonconforming (GNC) people in technology.”
As with some of the other tech industry-focussed stock photo collections, Queer in Tech is especially useful if you run an online business and want to show a diverse range of people working digitally. Or if you’re a solopreneur and want visual representations of a meeting.
Vice’s Gender Spectrum Collection is a collection of inclusive stock photography, “featuring images of trans and non-binary models that go beyond the clichés. This collection aims to help media better represent members of these communities as people not necessarily defined by their gender identities.”
We’ve used lots of images from The Gender Spectrum Collection in our free eBook, The Good Egg Guide to Building a Feel Good Business.
Need help adding more imagery to your site? Buy our Holly’s day to tick that (or any other website task) off your to-do list.
Whilst not specifically focused on diversity and inclusion, here are some other royalty-free digital photos where you can find diverse stock images. As these aren’t dedicated sites, you might have to search a little harder for inclusive imagery.
Pexels offers a huge range of royalty-free stock imagery and videos for websites and digital projects provided by its community of creators.
Split between Unsplash (free) and Unsplash+ (premium), all photos and illustrations in this massive stock image library can be used for personal or commercial projects.
Kaboompics provides an aesthetic stock photo library with quality photos from curated photo shoots. You can use images for free across your website, social media, and even for commercial products.
Ready for a shiny new website, but don’t have the time/headspace to build one yourself? Don’t worry, we know a couple of Good Eggs who can handle the web design, copy, and SEO for you!
Copy is the backbone of your website (not that we’re biased 😉), but images really help flesh it out.
In an ideal world, you’ll have high-quality brand photos to populate your website — they build trust, show authenticity, and help customers develop a unique connection with you and your business.
But if time or resources mean that you’ve not got brand photos yet, having a bank of diverse stock images to hand will really add some pizzazz to your site. They can also be useful for illustrating blog posts or newsletters to break up the text and keep your reader engaged.
Pictures aren’t only for decoration — having images of people on your website is also good for business. Digital behaviour and testing company VWO ran A/B tests on conversion rates and found that “human photos on a website do have a positive impact on visitors’ first impression of trustworthiness.” So don’t just go for abstract shapes and items; get a few lovely faces on your site.
If you’re the kind of good egg who cares about using diverse stock images, we’re willing to bet that you also care about being ethical and inclusive in other ways. Now that you’ve hopefully found some pictures you’d like to use, here are a few best practices for using them on your website.
One of the useful things about stock image sites is that they provide really high-quality images that are suitable for print as well as for online usage. However, these high-quality images are often massive in terms of dimensions and file sizes. Large images (anything more than 300 – 500kb) weigh your website down, increase page load times and add to your digital carbon footprint.
We’d always recommend using JPEG/JPG image format (or WebP if your website provider allows it). PNG files are much bigger, so only use them if you need a transparent background, for something like a logo or cutout image.
To make your images more environmentally friendly, reduce them to a smaller width (2000 pixels wide is a fairly safe bet as a default) and run them through an image optimiser like Tiny JPG or Tiny PNG.
Want to learn more about how and why you should consider making your online presence greener? Read more here.
Whenever you’re using someone else’s photos, it’s a good idea to know whether or not they need to be explicitly credited on your site. Some of the big stock imagery websites, like Pexels and Unsplash, don’t require you to credit them when using their photos, but lots of the sites we’ve mentioned in this blog do.
Depending on their licensing agreement, adding an attribution can be a legal requirement, but it’s also a nice thing to do. As you’ll have noticed, many of these collections of inclusive stock photos have been created as grassroots resources by small organisations and communities to try and make the internet a better place, so give them credit where it’s due.
Alt text (or alternative text) is a text description of an image. Having good alt text on your website makes it more accessible for blind and vision-impaired people, as it’s used by assistive technology like screen readers. The RNIB has some useful advice on writing good alt text, as does vision-impaired blogger Veronica Lewis at Veronica With Four Eyes.
Well-written alt text isn’t just a win for accessibility but can also help your site’s SEO. The robots that find information for search engines can’t ‘see’ images, but they can read alt text.
For example, say a page on your website is a lovely gallery of lamps, but none of those photos have alt text. Without that alt text, Google has no way of knowing there are lamps on that page, so it won’t show up in search results for someone hoping to light their dark room. Add some descriptive alt text, and Google will have much more to work with (and you’ll increase your chances of your site appearing when potential customers search for lamps).
If you’ve been through all the stock image sites and can’t quite find the right photo to go with your blog post, you might be considering asking Canva, Dall-E, or another AI platform to create your ideal image. However, AI image generators often give racist and sexist results, and generative AI is really bad for the environment.
AI uses an extravagant amount of resources, particularly for things that a human could easily do themselves (or hire someone else to do for them). In the marvelously named study ‘Power Hungry Processing: ⚡️Watts ⚡️ Driving the Cost of AI Deployment?’, researchers calculated that making one image with generative AI uses the same amount of energy as fully charging a mobile phone.
In the same way that you might prioritise walking or cycling over driving, if you care about sustainability, be thoughtful about how you use AI.
If finding photos of people is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to your website to-do list, and you’re feeling pretty overwhelmed, then we are here to help!
Not sure which service will be most helpful, or need something more bespoke? Get in touch to chat about your options.
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