About Barnimages

Barnimages is a small, independent collection of free stock photography, run by the two photographers who started it in 2015. Every image on the site was made with a camera by a person.

Who We Are

Barnimages was founded in March 2015 by Igor Trepeshchenok and Roman Drits, two photographers based in Hamburg. More than a decade later it is still the two of us — no parent company, no investors, no acquisition. We shoot, edit, select, and publish everything ourselves.

That has always been the point. Barnimages was never built to be sold. It was built because we wanted a place where good photographs could be given away without being turned into filler.

Independent by Choice

Unsplash belongs to Getty Images. Pexels and Pixabay belong to Canva. Barnimages belongs to the two people who started it.

We say this once and then move on, because the point isn’t who owns them — it’s what independence lets us do. Nobody else sets our roadmap. No catalogue strategy decides what gets published. Nothing about this site changes because a priority shifted somewhere else.

Photography First

Every image on Barnimages was made by a photographer standing somewhere, at some hour, deciding where to point the camera. Nothing here is generated.

A photograph has provenance — a place, a moment, a person who can tell you what was happening. For a lot of work, editorial especially, that difference is the whole job.

Curated, Not Crawled

We don’t run an open upload queue. Nothing lands here automatically. Each photo is chosen because it does something — carries a mood, tells a story, or simply looks unlike the thousand near-identical frames every other search returns.

The result is a library you can browse to the end of. That’s deliberate. If you need ten million results, you know where to find them.

Free to Use, Not Free of Authorship

Barnimages photos are free to download and use for personal and commercial projects. No account, no download limits, no attribution required — though a credit is always appreciated. You’re welcome to modify them, add text, crop, and build them into your own work.

What you can’t do is take the photograph itself. Our images aren’t CC0 — copyright stays with the photographer. That means no claiming an image as your own, no reselling or redistributing the files as they are, and no republishing them on other stock platforms unless the download links back here. Prints are fine; selling prints isn’t. Merchandise needs a separate licence, so talk to us first. And no NFTs.

The full terms, including a few restrictions around hateful and defamatory use, are on the License page.

How Barnimages Stays Free

The photos are free. The site isn’t. Hosting, bandwidth, and time are covered by a modest amount of advertising, a handful of affiliate recommendations for tools we actually use ourselves, and donations from people who find the collection useful.

We don’t sell your data and we don’t put downloads behind an account. If you’d like to help, a donation or a mention somewhere goes further than you’d think.

Common Questions