Diverse Stock Images: 10 Free Image Libraries For Inclusive Websites

Using a wide range of authentic, diverse stock images promotes diversity and inclusion, and fosters a sense of belonging that makes everyone feel welcome. But typically, traditional stock imagery of people isn’t very inclusive.

It often presents a bland and narrow view of the world, where queer and gender-nonconforming people, disabled people, and people of colour are very rarely featured. And that’s not a version of the world we want to see.

Thankfully, there’s a growing number of collections of royalty-free, inclusive stock imagery that reflect the dazzling diversity of communities and identities worldwide. In this blog, we’re sharing some of our favourite free resources for diverse stock photo collections that we use for client websites and our own web design, plus some tips for using them ethically and inclusively.

1. Age Positive Image Library

This is the best resource for stock imagery if your target audience covers a broad age range, is solely 50+, or you just want to show age without limits.

Turning fifty doesn’t suddenly mean all you can do is sit in your house and drink tea, no matter what traditional stock imagery would have you believe!

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”.

2. The Jopwell Collection

If you need photos of people working on laptops or holding meetings, The Jopwell Collection is the resource for you!

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”.

3. Nappy

Bookmark this site for beautiful, culturally diverse imagery across work, tech, travel, sport, and family life.

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 inclusivity and feature Black, Asian, and global majority groups on their site.

4. #WOCinTech

This site is incredibly useful if, like us, your work is women-centric, laptop-based, and you need lots of diverse stock imagery for your website and blogs.

The #WOCinTech Chat team noticed the “huge deficit of images displaying women of colour 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 in our web-design-related posts and pages, as they have a huge a variety of photos of women working on computers (aka what we also do all day).

5. AllGo’s Plus-Size Stock Photos

Plus-size people should be seen in all content, not just content focused onplus-size issues. If you agree, you’ll love this body liberation-focused stock imagery collection.

Technology company AllGo commissioned its own library of stock photos featuring plus-size people, 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”.

6. Disabled And Here

Grassroots advocacy group Affect runs Disabled and Here, “A disability-led effort to provide free and 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 in the collection, and they provide very detailed image descriptions for each picture, making it easy to add ALT text to your site.

7. Queer in Tech

This is a great site if you’re a biz owner, solopreneur, or content creator and want visual representations of meetings (we’ve used this platform lots in our own content).

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-focused stock photo collections, Queer in Tech is especially useful if you run an online business and want to show underrepresented groups working digitally.

Three Other Free Sources For Diverse Stock Images

Whilst not specifically focused on diversity and inclusion, here are some other royalty-free digital photos featuring diverse stock images. As these aren’t dedicated sites, you might have to search a little harder for inclusive imagery.

Pexels

Pexels offers a huge range of royalty-free stock imagery and videos for websites and digital projects provided by its community of creators. There are a good number of culturally diverse stock photos to choose from on here.

Unsplash

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

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.

When To Use Diverse Stock Images

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, because 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 haven’t 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, too.

Best Practices For Using Diverse Stock Images

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.

Optimise Your Images

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 – 500 KB) 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.

Want to learn more about how and why you should consider making your online presence greener? Read our guide to making your website sustainable.

Credit Sources For Diverse Stock Images

Whenever you’re using someone else’s photos, it’s a good idea to check if their licensing agreement means you have to explicitly credit them 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 for lots of the sites we’ve mentioned in this blog, adding an attribution is a legal requirement.

Whether or not it’s required by law, noting your image sources is also just a nice thing to do. As you’ll have noticed, many of our favourite collections of inclusive stock photos have been created by small organisations to try and make the internet a better place, so give them credit where it’s due.

Remember To Add Image Descriptions

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.

Say you have an e-commerce page selling lamps, but the product photos don’t 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 image search results for someone hoping to light their dark room.

By adding some descriptive alt text, Google et al will have much more to work with (and you’ll increase your chances of your site appearing when potential customers search for lamps).

Avoid Using Generative AI To Create Diverse Stock Images

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 can give racist and sexist results, which isn’t ideal when you’re aiming for inclusivity.

Generative AI is also really bad for the environment. In the marvellously 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.

Stuck on More Than Just Finding Inclusive Images for Your Website?

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