Free & Paid Stock Birth and Postpartum Photo Sources for your Website (Updated 2024)
Let's face it - there is a wide range of truly bad stock photography out there readily available for you to illustrate doula care on your website. Cheesy, unrealistic, excessive pregnant glow, and Very limited diversity represented in ethnicity, and LGBTQI+ families.
Most photos of birth involve a health care practitioner & a blood pressure cuff, or a woman laying nearly flat in a hospital bed. NOT exactly the portrayal of doula care and birth work you want to send!
While there are the standard free stock photos out there to choose from, all of which have some decent and a few fabulous photos in the mix, the stock photography business has opened up considerably in the past few years to include some innovative options. Some are free, and some require a good financial investment, but all offer a different range of quality and realism in their available stock photos.
Free Stock Photos for Doulas
With all of these sites be sure to carefully review the license agreements and provide photo credit as required. It can be very confusing looking at attribution & licensing requirements for photos.
- Unsplash features a blend of free and paid photos by professional photographers with optional attribution. I've gathered collections of pregnancy photos, baby photos and birth photos for you to review. I use Unsplash a lot when I need a quick photo for a blog post.
- Kaboompics offers a similar range of lovely high-quality FREE photos with a focus on lifestyle images. Again, basically no photos specific to birth or postpartum work but lots of lovely photos of nature, food, technology, etc...
- Pexels and pixabay offer a decent selection of FREE pregnancy, birth, baby, and breastfeeding photos. They lean more towards the cheesy side of stock photography and/or amateur photos, but there are some good ones mixed in. You need to set their search bar to limit the search to creative commons open license photos.
- The Commons on Flickr strives to "share hidden treasures from the world's public photography archives". It's worth taking a wonder through to see what you might find!
- I can't resist sharing Gratisography, offering a range of FREE photos that tend towards the slightly bizarre and silly. Just take a look, a description here simply won't do them justice.
Innovative & Quality Doula Stock Photo Sites
The sites below are definitely not FREE stock photos for doulas, but they do offer a great range of photos and very high-quality options. Remember it just takes a few quality photos to transform a website!
- Stocksy features high-level photos from professional photographers. They have a few nice birth ones, plenty of babies, at least one nice placenta shot, and some nice pregnant options. In a quick review prices for most photos are $15 - $30 for the sizes most of you would need (under 2000px wide).
- Birth Becomes Her has gathered an extraordinary collection of powerful pregnancy, birth and baby photos including categories with both home and hospital birth.
- Lem and June has wonderful monthly memberships and collections of pregnancy, birth and postpartum photography to choose from.
- Creative Market has a gorgeous and reasonably priced blend of both photography and illustrations and fonts. If you're looking for beautiful watercolor illustrations, hand-drawn icons, funky feathers, sweet colorful birds, custom fonts, etc... this is the place.
Standard Paid Stock Photos for Doulas
The sites listed below all offer a standard range of stock photography & illustration options, with the photo quality on the adobe site being slightly higher.
- Shutterstock offers a package of 5 photos for $49.
- Deposit Photos You can choose a one-month subscription for up to 75 photos.
- iStock Photo includes a free trial month with up to 10 photos, and divides their collection into premium and standard collection photos. You buy credit packs, and individual image credit values vary.
- Adobe Stock Photos are sold on a subscription basis with the lowest package at $29.99/month for just 3 photos. Note the first month in free and includes up to 10 of their standard (not premium) photos.
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How to choose the right stock photos for your doula website
1. Check the lighting
The lighting of your stock photos can make all the difference between a fake glow and a realistic portrayal of birth and postpartum.
2. Choose your photo size & resolution carefully
If you are going to be using a photo in a full-width banner, you need an image that is at least 2000px wide. If the image you are downloading is in the 1500px range but higher resolution, that's fine - it will downsize without losing quality.
3. Is the photo overused and on every other local doula's website?
A simple way to establish yourself as a professional doula is to have unique photography on your website. You can use Tineye to upload a photo and see how often it has been used & where!
4. Look for natural photo poses
You know how some photos feel 100% posed, and others feel more natural? You're looking for the rare photos that feel a bit more candid - and therefore real - to your audience. essentially you're in search of the unicorn stock photos that don't actually FEEL like stock photos!
