The adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” holds true for most websites and blogs. As a long-time blogger, I can attest to that. While many of the images on my sites are my own, occasionally, I tap into external sources to find good-quality free tennis images that fit my blog posts.

High-quality images help boost the appeal of your site’s content. Many sites draw you in with offers of royalty-free photos. However, you will quickly find that the selection of free images is limited. The ones you really want are watermarked, restricted, or behind a paywall.

I have identified a few sites that offer free tennis images useful for people who create sports-related content. Though my focus has been tennis and squash, these sites provide a wide variety of images suitable for content that goes way beyond sports.

The sites listed in this post offer decent quality free images under licence options that range from “No Copyright” to “Attribution Required.” Images without copyright restrictions leave the attribution choice up to you.

Before using pictures from external sources, please ensure that you understand and comply with the sites’ copyright restrictions.

Ten sources for free tennis images are shown below. For free pickleball images, check out this post.

Flickr

Flickr is my first option when looking for images for my blog site. As far as quality and quantity of free images go, Flickr is hard to beat.

With the correct search terms and filters, you can find royalty-free tennis images that work for most situations. It is important to note that not all photos on Flickr are available under CC licences. The default licence setting for uploaded images on Flickr is “All rights reserved,” which would mean that such images usually come at a cost or require explicit permission from the owner for reuse.

If you are looking for royalty-free tennis images, you may want to check out Carine06 UK, si.robi, and Rob Keating on Flickr.

Google Images

Google is my second option when looking for images for my blog site. Using the “Tools” tab, I filter down to the pictures under the Creative Commons (CC) licence. The downside of using free images from Google is that every other person with a website will also be doing the same.

Wikimedia Commons

Searching for images on Wikimedia Commons is akin to searching Google images using the CC filter. Many images shown under the images tab on Google are pulled from Wikimedia Commons. Going straight to Wikimedia ensures that you don’t inadvertently use an image that is copyright protected.

Unsplash

With over two million images and a growing number of contributors, Unsplash undoubtedly has become the go-to site for free images. Even though their licensing model has evolved over the years, some good quality free tennis images are still available for download that are worth checking out. Unsplash images are covered by their unique license, which explains why their pictures don’t appear on Wikipedia and Wikimedia.

Not many people know that Getty Images now own Unsplash.

Pixabay

If you are into vector graphics and posed images, you may like Pixabay. Following a model similar to Unsplash, the images on Pixabay are user uploaded and mostly available free under the custom Pixabay licence. With some patience, you can find some decent tennis images on this site.

Pixabay was acquired in 2018 by Canva, the Australian graphic design platform.

Pexels

As a smaller version of Pixabay, Pexels offers mostly posed photos of amateurs and random tennis courts. If you are looking for candid pictures of professional athletes, this site may not work for you.

Images on Pexels are offered under the Pexels licence.

VisualHunt

For a site that is not very well know, there are several usable royalty-free tennis images on this site. VisualHunt promotes itself as a visual search engine that offers content to users looking for products, photos, and ideas. Surprisingly, VisualHunt does not have a category called “sports” under its dropdown menu.

VisualHunt is based in New York City and offers images under the Attribution-Non-commercial 2.0 Generic licence.

Canva

In the true sense, Canva is not an image-sharing site. However, as a graphic design platform, it offers some free images primarily meant to be used as part of larger creative works and projects. If you are unfamiliar with Canva, finding images can be tricky since the image search tab only shows up when creating a design.

A crown symbol on some of the images denotes watermarked files that are limited for paid subscriber use. Unfortunately, a lot of the pictures on Canva fall under this category.

PxHere

I have not used images from PxHere yet. Since many of the photos on this site are licensed under the CC0 1.0 (No Copyright), I figured it rated inclusion in this list. Give it a try; you may stumble upon an image you can use.

Getty Images

As the largest provider of stock photos, Getty Images is your best option if you have the budget to buy high-resolution images that suit almost all situations. Corporations, advertising agencies, and graphic design companies have been using Getty Images for their creative print and online media requirements.

What is perhaps less known is that a section of Getty Images is dedicated to freely embeddable images. If you can live with images being served from Getty’s servers and not your hosting provider’s, you may want to check out embeddable pictures from the Getty site. I used the Getty Images WordPress plugin to embed the above images into this post.

While on the subject of embeds, embedding images and posts from Instagram was considered legal until recently. However, recent court rulings have changed that. Before embedding images from Instagram on your future projects, you may want to read this article.

So there, now you have ten sources for free tennis images.

If you know of a site that should be on this list, please let me know in the comments section below.