No, you generally cannot sell photos you got for free from sites like Pexels or Unsplash because they are licensed for "free" use (often royalty-free or CC0), not for you to resell as your own work, which violates their terms and copyright; you must sell your own original photos on stock sites like Shutterstock, Freepik, or others after becoming a contributor. Trying to sell free images you found can lead to legal trouble, as you'd be misrepresenting ownership.
Payhip lets you sell your photos for free. You don't need to pay anything until you make a sale, then you simply pay a small commission on every sale. This makes it easy to start your photography business, even if you're on a very tight budget. Payhip even gives you a free online store, if you want one.
A CC0 license dedicates a work to the public domain as completely as possible. You can copy, modify, and distribute it — even for commercial use — with no attribution required (though crediting the creator is still a best practice).
By anticipating clients' needs and putting in the hard work, photographers can earn a lot through stock photography. Diana Mironenko, who contributes travel and fashion photos to Canva and other websites, earns about USD 20 to USD 700 per photo.
In most cases, if you have the right to use any stock image, you can use it anywhere including videos. As copyright-free images are often labeled as being in the public domain or released under a Creative Commons license that permits unrestricted use, you can legally use these images in your picture.
Purchase the Appropriate License: Select a license that aligns with your intended use of the image. If you plan to use it for commercial purposes, make sure to purchase a commercial license. Keep Records: Maintain a record of all the images you've purchased, including their licenses.
Search the U.S. Copyright Office Database
Here, you can search by the photographer's name or the title of the image — this will potentially show you if the given work was officially registered for copyright.
The best way to sell photographs online is by selling them as stock images for sale on third-party websites like iStock, Shutterstock, or Alamy. Selling your photos through stock sites is quick, easy, and affordable.
Over time, we were able to research the sites and analyze what are the general photo topics that sell the best on almost any stock agency.
💡 Selling stock photos in 2025… is it still worth it? Spoiler: not a get-rich-quick scheme 😅 But if you shoot a niche like people, events or landmarks, it can bring in some passive income and give your old shots a second life.
Although these images are free, you should still cite them if you're using them in your work.
Generally, public domain images don't require citation or permissions, making them a very useful resource when you're looking for easy-to-use visuals. But be careful; make sure you verify that the image is indeed in the public domain before using it.
Portrait and family photography
Taking pictures of families and individuals is perhaps the most prevalent type of photography done by freelancers. It won't be long before you're swamped with work if this is your field of expertise. Photographs of growing and changing families are constantly in demand.
Top 10 Photo Selling Websites
For 2 hours of photography, you could charge anywhere from $100 for beginners/students to $300-$1000+ for experienced professionals, depending heavily on your skill, market, type of shoot (portraits vs. corporate), location, and what's included (edited photos, prints, travel). Calculate your base costs (equipment, software, insurance, time) and add profit, aiming for rates like $150-$400/hour generally, but be prepared to adjust for demand and experience.
The Big Three are the easiest composition tools to learn, spot within a scene, and utilize in a composition. These three tools are the focal point, leading lines, and frames. Key Lesson: Photo composition is about creating a road map into and around a picture.
Unsplash
Unsplash is one of the most popular free stock photo websites. It offers an expansive library of modern, high-quality photos that are widely used across design, marketing, and content creation.
Contributors report earning $0.08-$2.28 per month, while some of the best-sellers yield $87.7 per month (aggregated in 2022).
However, certain types of photography have been consistently popular and may continue to be in demand:
Common reasons for rejection
Release is incomplete or missing required fields. Handwriting is illegible. The file is low resolution, blurry, cut off, or otherwise unreadable. Non-English releases are used that are not from Shutterstock, Easy Release, Getty Images, iStockphoto, or Adobe.
Use only your original work in your project. Get written permission to reproduce another's work. Use content licensed with Creative Commons agreements. The Search identifies content that you can use.
In most cases, you don't need to credit the artist or Shutterstock. However, there are a few specific circumstances that do require you to credit the image or video properly. In these cases, you must make an attribution that's located and sized so that viewers can easily read it unaided.
It is not copyright infringement to photograph something that has been photographed before. Nor is it infringement to make photographs depicting the same idea or concept. Remember that copyright law protects only (1) original works of authorship and (2) the particular expression and not ideas.