5 Sites For Free Footage And Stills

October 19, 2018

5 sites for free footage and stills

A person is holding a polaroid picture of a tree in a field.

19th October 2018 by CH

We know how much time and dedication goes into creating high-quality video content.

Whether it’s corporate or commercial, stock footage and stills can be handy to have at your disposal if you can’t film exactly what you need.

Getting the perfect clip or image into your video can make all the difference – you can fill gaps and link scenes together, to be more specific with your content.

There’s plenty of online resources for downloading high-quality footage and images, but most charge a usage fee or subscription.

Which is why we’ve picked 5 of the best royalty-free sites that are free to use…

Unsplash
If you need powerful visuals, Unsplash offers a host of lifestyle photographs that cover all manner of subjects. Whether it’s fashionable shots or landscapes, Unsplash is a good call.

This site is all about photographers getting more exposure for their work. But most importantly, it’s completely free to use. Plus, they have a do-whatever-you-want (royalty-free) philosophy when it comes to using the images available. It’s a win-win.

Pixabay
Pixabay is great for 4k. You can get hold of fantastic short clips that work really well and give you the best quality to work with. There are also photos, illustrations, vector graphics and more available.

Stock Footage for Free
Stock Footage for Free is a site dedicated to getting superb stock footage to users for free. There’s footage covering everything from Construction and Energy to Nature and Animals.

Clipstill
To the untrained eye, a cinemagraph may look like a simple photograph but on closer inspection, these images are moving, with a few seconds of video mixed with an original photograph to create subtly brilliant visual content. If cinemagraphs are what you’re looking for, Clipstill is a great place to head to. They have a broad range of free content.

Pexels
Another good site for high-resolution imagery is Pexels. This is a good option when it comes to finding stills to use in your videos. All images can be used for free for commercial and non-commercial purposes, and can be edited and modified as desired.

Create great video content

We hope this has given you more options for finding footage and stills on a budget.

But if you’re not happy with what’s out there, we can help. Just say hello.

Share this post:

Recent posts

By Emily Blanden June 3, 2026
Fast turnaround videos. What we do and what our clients do to make it work. Our Managing Director, Emily Blanden, shares what we’ve learned from creating fast-turnaround videos for our clients - without the panic stations. From getting the brief nailed down early to keeping feedback clear and speedy, Emily talks through the little things that make a big difference when deadlines are tight.  My team might not thank me for writing this. We’ve just completed two motion graphics projects on extremely tight turnarounds. A three minute video briefed in and delivered within six working days. A five minute video done in four. Sharing how we did this might result in us getting even more last minute briefs, sorry in advance to my team! Short lead time work is stressful. We’d always love more time. But over the years we’ve developed a process that makes it possible to create quality work, fast and I think it’s worth sharing, because a lot of it comes down to what both sides of the relationship do along the way.
By Madeline Moores May 12, 2026
We're #23 in the UK Top 50 Big news from us! CH Video have climbed 7 places in the EVCOM (Event & Visual Communication Association) + Moving Image UK Top 50.
By Aidan Patterson May 12, 2026
When Euronics came to us with a brief, it was a good one: take a true story about an extraordinary delivery and turn it into something worth watching. The Brief Joe, a Euronics delivery agent, had been tasked with getting a chest freezer to a customer in rural Wales. The road ran out. He carried on anyway, on foot, through fields, across rivers and over hills. The customer was delighted. The story deserved to be told. Euronics asked us to produce a short comedic video retelling that journey. The challenge was finding the right visual language to match the scale of the tale. The Concept We pitched several approaches centred on a comic-book aesthetic, bold, energetic and a little tongue-in-cheek. It felt like the right fit: a story that was equal parts heroic and absurd, told in a style that leaned into both. The concept paired real interview footage of Joe with AI-generated visuals to bring his journey to life. Where a traditional shoot would have required location days across Welsh countryside, generative AI gave us the tools to illustrate the story scene by scene. Creative Wrangling We filmed Joe against a studio blue backdrop, letting him tell the story in his own words. His delivery did a lot of the heavy lifting (puns intended!), dry, matter-of-fact and quietly brilliant. The AI-generated visuals were built around detailed multi-angle reference sheets for Joe, the Euronics van and the chest freezer.
All posts