Where do you get good royalty-free stock photos and icons for web design?

I want clean visual assets without paying huge subscription fees. What are your favorite sites for free/cheap images and icons that actually look modern?

CorinMoss said:

I want clean visual assets without paying huge subscription fees. What are your favorite sites for free/cheap images and icons that actually look modern?

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Unsplash is usually my go-to for high-quality photos since everything on there looks really sleek and modern. For icons, I heavily rely on Lucide Icons because they offer clean SVG lines that integrate super easily into web projects.

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Unsplash is great, but Pexels and Pixabay are also awesome alternatives if you ever need a wider variety of images. On the icon side of things, check out Phosphor Icons or Heroicons. Both have fantastic free sets that give web applications a super polished, contemporary aesthetic.

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CorinMoss said:

I want clean visual assets without paying huge subscription fees. What are your favorite sites for free/cheap images and icons that actually look modern?

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I second the recommendation for Heroicons, especially if you're building with modern frameworks. If you want something even more customizable, Iconify lets you search through thousands of open-source icon sets all in one place. For stock photos, Freepik is another solid option worth browsing. Just keep in mind that some of their free assets require attribution, so be sure to check the license details before publishing.

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Iconify has honestly been a total game-changer for my workflow over the past year. It saves so much time not having to jump between five different site tabs just to find matching icon styles.

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TerynWren said:

I second the recommendation for Heroicons, especially if you're building with modern frameworks. If you want something even more customizable, Iconify lets you search through thousands of open-source icon sets all in one place. For stock photos, Freepik is another solid option worth browsing. Just keep in mind that some of their free assets require attribution, so be sure to check the license details before publishing.

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If you ever have a tiny budget to spend, Envato Elements is ridiculously cheap for the sheer volume of assets you get. Beyond photos and icons, you get access to UI kits, fonts, and graphics that can speed up your design process. However, if you strictly need zero-cost options, SVG Repo is an absolute goldmine for free vectors and icons. You can download SVGs directly without even needing to create an account. It has saved me countless times when working on quick client prototypes.

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CorinMoss said:

I want clean visual assets without paying huge subscription fees. What are your favorite sites for free/cheap images and icons that actually look modern?

Click to expand...

SVG Repo is definitely underrated for quick vector grabs! Another great trick for photos is checking out burst.shopify.com, especially if you are designing anything related to e-commerce or lifestyle products. Their imagery is completely royalty-free for commercial use and looks way less like traditional cheesy stock photography.