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25 Culturally Diverse Stock Photo Websites (Free & Paid)

It wasn’t too long ago that stock photos featuring people of different ethnicities were extremely hard to come by. Happily, there are more diverse stock photo collections and websites popping up on a regular basis, covering a huge range of nationalities, skin tones, and ethnic backgrounds across ages and genders.

So we’ve put together a list of our favorite paid and free websites to download stock photos featuring men and women of color. Whether you’re looking for African-American, Hispanic, Asian, or any other culture or race, you’re sure to find exactly what you need from one of these websites.

(As a quick note, please remember to check the image licensing for any photo you wish to use, as licenses vary by site and are subject to change at any time).

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On with the photos!
 

01. Nappy.co

Nappy specializes in “beautiful, high-res photos of black and brown people”…and what’s even better is that they’re free!

Nappy

 

02. Iwaria

Iwaria specializes in African imagery, which includes landscapes and cultures as well as people. We’ve linked directly to the People category, which features free photos of men and women in a huge range of settings, from sitting at computers to working out at the gym.

 

03. Mocha Stock

Mocha Stock is a fantastic website that has the added bonus of illustrations and videos as well as photos. You can choose to buy a membership or pay as you go with credits.

 

04. Brwn Stock Imaging

Brwn Stock Imaging features beautiful, positive photos in a range of settings and collections starting at $25 and up.

 

05. Create Her Stock

Create Her Stock is extremely affordable at just $7 a month, which gives you access to over 1000 images with more added regularly. There are also some free images available for you to download.

Women of Color Stock Photos

 

06. POC Stock

POC Stock has a gorgeous range of beautifully composed photos suitable for all kinds of projects!

 

07. Women in Tech

Women in Tech began as a project to bring together free-to-use photos of women of color in tech.

 

08. Picnoi

For just $49.99 you can download all the photos Picnoi has to offer with all the new additions emailed to you for a year after. They have fantastic photos covering a wide range of settings and sizes.

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09. Unsplash Collections

Unsplash has a lot of great user-created collections like this one by Addie Fisher so you can access relevant groups of free photos easily instead of having to browse manually yourself.

Free People of Color Stock Photos

 

10. Tonl

“Diversity leads to innovation” is the motto of Tonl, a beautiful membership-based stock photo resource where you can pay per photo or download a set number of images every month depending on the membership level you choose.

 

11. 500px

500px has hundreds of thousands of diverse stock photos. Try using the search to look for “woman of color” or similar terms.

 

12. Haute Stock

Haute Stock is famous for its stylish, feminine images, and there are women of color featured among the flatlay photos too.

 

13. SC Stockshop

SC Stockshop is one of the more expensive options in this list, but it’s a good choice if you’re looking for top quality photos.

 

14. Envato Stock

Envato Stock’s search is super powerful, so you can enter relevant keywords to search for images of people from all different cultures and ethnic backgrounds. Prices start from $29/month for unlimited membership.

Asian Stock Photo Resources

 

15. Blend Images

Blend Images offers bright, professional photos in both free and paid collections.

 

16. Jopwell

Jopwell puts a different twist on stock photos by offering them in the categories of students, interns, offices, professionals, and workplace photos.

 

17. Adobe Stock

A more expensive alternative to Envato’s stock membership, Adobe Stock also has a great range of results for photos by ethnicity. Here’s an example of our search for Hispanic photos.

Adobe Stock Photos Hispanic

 

18. Stocksy

Stocksy covers a diverse range of ethnicities. Even searching for something as simple as ‘women’ returns an impressive range of results.

 

19. UK Black Tech

UK Black Tech has a bunch of great stock photos you can download with all kinds of ages and settings represented. Best of all, they’re free!

 

20. Diversity Photos

Diversity Photos has wonderful representation of culturally diverse photos with monthly collections so you’re never short of something fresh to use.

 

21. iStockPhoto

One of the great things about iStockPhoto is that simply searching for ‘women’ returns a broad range of photos celebrating different ethnicities. iStockPhoto works on a cost per image basis, where prices vary depending on the image itself and the size you want to download it at.

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Where to get stock photos of women of color

 

22. Raw Pixel

Raw Pixel has a wide variety of photos featuring people from all over the world, so you’re sure to find an image that fits your needs.

 

23. Pexels

For free women of color photos, try She Bold. We always recommend tracing free photos back to the original photographer just to make sure they know their photo is listed.

 

24. Eye for Ebony

Eye for Ebony features beautifully warm styled stock photos. Subscribing to the newsletter bags you beautiful free photos too!

 

25. Color Joy Stock

Color Joy Stock is an affordable and beautiful stock photo subscription that describes itself as “for women of color.” Definitely worth checking out!

 
Did we miss your favorite website? Let us know in the comments!

 
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24 Websites To Download Culturally Diverse Stock Photos

Jenni Brown
Co-founder of Lyrical Host, Jenni has been in the web hosting industry for years and specializes in social media, copywriting, search engine optimization, and email marketing. She loves cats, baking, photography, and gaming.

26 Comments
  • 10/24/2017

    Awesome! I just started using Create Her Stock some weeks ago. I’ll check the others out. Thanks!

  • 11/02/2017

    Yes. Fantastic. I use a lot of stock – I used to make web ads and we used stock all the time. I would try to make all of my ads culturally diverse and sometimes it was really hard to find non-white models! I actually photoshopped images that only had hands in them sometimes to show different skin tones.

  • 11/02/2017

    Thank you for posting this. This is very helpful. I’m at the very early stages of developing my yoga brand and this is very helpful. It is challenging to find diverse images in this niche.

  • 11/04/2017

    Thanks so much for including us! It is truly appreciated.

  • 11/10/2017

    Hi Jenni,

    Love the article. Thanks for sharing. It’s not easy to find stock images of people from diverse background. Would be cool if you would add rawpixel.com to the list as well (some of rawpixel images are actually on the iStock images you selected) Check it out, I won’t disappoint you πŸ™‚ !

    Cheers,

    Tip

  • 12/13/2017

    thanks for sharing I do struggle to find images that are not yet already everywhere online.This will be really helpful as I will now have more places to chose from.

  • 03/30/2018

    So helpful! I always struggle to find stock photos that fit into the theme of my blog

  • Ebony Grimsley
    Reply
    05/16/2018

    This is a great list. Is there a list of diverse stock video sites?

    Thanks

  • Jamie Sterling
    Reply
    08/31/2018

    Reshot.com just launched and they have a Diversity Matters pack, how do you think it stacks up?

  • 12/05/2019

    Thank you for writing a blog post listing stock photo sites that focus on diversity! I am the founder of Rosebud AI a venture funded startup based in San Francisco. We released a collection of 25,000 AI generated photos with diverse models (which can be dynamically personalized). We expect to be augmenting the collection to over a hundred thousand before the end of year. https://generative.photos

  • 06/19/2020

    Wonderful article! Would you consider adding Pexels to this list? We offer 100% free photos and videos, and diversity is a number one priority for our library. We have lots of great content featuring people of color, and we’re always adding more. We’ve also partnered with both Jopwell and Nappy to bring more diverse images onto the platform. Hope this is helpful! Thanks for sharing these resources.

  • 07/08/2020

    Thanks for sharing! I just signed up with POC STOCK. Excited to start shooting for them. I shared your list with several friends – I really appreciate the time you took to prepare this resource!

  • Ashley Nance
    Reply
    06/17/2022

    Thank you for posting this. I did my own search for stock photo sites that provide more diverse images, and only got to 5, and that was a stretch. I’ve got a ton of tabs open now ready to jump in and explore some more options. Thank you!

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