Posted by Halloween is officially over and it’s now time for a lot of green, gold, red, and white! Planning holiday-themed content might sound easy but it’s still important to be prepared. It’s also important to make sure your content is warm, and cozy and gives out all sorts of wintery Christmassy feels!
If you run your own business or are single-handedly managing social media, or you don’t have someone making creatives for you, it might be too time-consuming to browse every image available on the internet yourself. I’m going to go ahead and assume that you already have a lot on your plate, including getting your own home and family ready for the season. And let’s not forget how time-consuming it is to get and wrap presents for everyone.
Don’t worry though! I’ve got you 😃
I’ll be listing out a bunch of reliable sources with absolutely gorgeous Holiday vibe-worthy images and videos you can download for free.
I would suggest sitting down with a hot chocolate and mini marshmallows before proceeding. 😉
1. Unsplash
Unsplash, owned by Getty Images, is a widely used website for free stock images. After using a keyword to search for particular themed data, you’ll get over 1000 images to browse through. But if you look carefully, you’ll see 2 other tabs — Collections and Users. Collections, as the name suggests are a collection of images related to the keyword used. It’s when a user has already gone through the hard work of browsing through multiple images and saved related images to the respective collection. This already makes it easier than simply browsing through images.
Using images from collections also ensures that your content is somewhat uniform and not all over the place.
Christmas by Heather Dou has around 500 images in the collection. Most of them can be used for feed posts.
Christmas and the Festive Season by Annie Spratt have about 300 images. Most of them are scenic and can be used for backgrounds, cover images, and feed posts.
You’ll notice that there is one important distinction between the 2 users. Heather’s has a mix of artwork created by different artists. While Annie’s Christmas collection has images created and uploaded herself.
Christmas by Pro Church Media also has a mix of feed posts, cover images, and more. They also have a few table layout Christmas-themed templates you can use for a season’s greeting card or a party invite. The possibilities are endless.
2. Pixabay
Pixabay is also another widely used site for free stock images and videos. It is owned by and is a subsidiary of Canva. They also have sound effects, music, and GIFs.
While they do not have a ‘collections’ tab, they do have a number of filters so that you can narrow down your search as much as possible.
First, from the drop-down on the search bar, you can choose between Images, videos, sound effects, GIFs, and others. The second bar has the rest of the filters. These include relevance, type, orientation, size, color, and published date.
In the image below I’ve used the horizontal (landscape) orientation and selected the color green. You can see that there is a mix of different kinds of images that can be used as feed posts, cover images, templates for invites or greeting cards, and even graphics for wrapping paper! I mean, how cool is that!
On Pixabay, instead of collections, they have tags. The most common tags are shown in the search page itself where the images are listed. Clicking on these tags takes you to a new page with search results of the selected tag. Just like in Pinterest-related searches.
Some images on Pixabay, while free to download, require attribution. These details can be found once an image is opened.
3. Pexels
Pexels is also owned by and is another subsidiary of Canva. It has an enormous bank of images and videos that you can browse through and download for free.
Whenever you search for a keyword, there will be bubble suggestions to look for images from other related keywords. In this case, we have a Christmas background, Christmas tree, Christmas lights, Merry Christmas, Winter, Snow, Christmas family, and more!
You’ll notice that there are some artists whose artwork is more populated on these search pages than others. You can visit these artists’ pages to see if they have collections of what you’re looking for to make your search easier.
For example, George Dolgikh may not have organized his work into collections, but you can see that has a bunch of stuff related to Christmas on his page. He has some cover images, and some templates using a table layout.
You can also download videos from Pexels. Here’s one artist that has a ton of images and videos under different collections. They’re called Cottonbro Studios.
The first image is from their Xmas Family collection and the second is from their Xmas decoration collection.
Collections display a mix of images and videos and all sizes and types.
4. Videvo
Videvo is a website that offers stock videos, but not all are free. However, they do have a filter to view all the free-to-download videos which make it easier to browse through their collections.
They also have a bunch of other filters for resolution, license type, and categories.
Videvo also has a bunch of featured collections that make it easier for you to browse through videos that you can use for your content.
For example, let’s say I have a page that covers festive recipes. I could use videos from a featured collection like Festive Feasts to help enhance the Festive feeling while sharing my recipe.
A few other worthy mentions that offer options to download images and videos for free are Picsart, Imgur, Vimeo, Videezy, and Canva templates!
These websites also have a lot of options to filter and get your desired Festive images and videos. 🙂
Bonus tip!
Consider this your Christmas gift! 😉
If visiting sites like Unsplash, Pixabay, and Imgur individually is still problematic for you, try Crowdfire!
They have this cool new Image Search option under the Content Curation Feature. You can select one of these sources from the drop-down and then type in your keyword.
The image results will be displayed along with a ‘Share’ button that will allow you to share them directly to your connected social accounts like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. If you’ve scrolled through enough images from one source, you can just switch the source from the drop-down. Crowdfire will then pull images related to the keyword that’s already typed in from the newly selected source.
You can even edit the caption in their Tailored post view. Once you’ve made the desired changes, you can post the image using one of their 3 options to post. Post now publishes the image immediately, Post at Custom Time allows you to schedule the publishing for a particular time, and Post at Best Time allows the app to calculate the best time for your post to be published based on audience engagement from your previous posts. Automation is at its peak!
Well, that’s it from me! Go on, spread the joy this Festive season. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! 😀 ❤
Where do you get your Holiday content from? Let me know in the comments below. 🙂