If you have ever needed a photo for a blog post, a slide deck, or a client mockup and did not have the budget for a stock subscription, you have probably ended up on Pixabay. It is one of the largest free media libraries on the web.
After more than a decade online, Pixabay has become a default first stop for designers, marketers, teachers, and WordPress site builders who need a decent image in a hurry.
Pixabay is very similar to UnSplash. It’s a stock photo site built for everyday creators.
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What is Pixabay?
Pixabay launched in 2010, founded in Germany by Hans Braxmeier and Simon Steinberger. The premise was simple: a place where photographers and illustrators could share work that anyone else could use, free, without the licensing paperwork that makes traditional stock agencies exhausting. In 2019, Canva acquired the site, alongside its sibling Pexels, and Pixabay has continued to operate as its own destination since.
The collection now runs to several million assets, and it is broader than photography alone:
- Photos: the bulk of the library, from landscapes and food to business and technology.
- Illustrations and vectors: useful when a photo is too literal.
- Videos: short b-roll style clips in HD and 4K.
- Music and sound effects: genuinely handy if you edit video.
- GIFs: a smaller collection, but there.
How does Pixabay licensing work?
This is the part that can trip people up. Pixabay originally released everything under CC0 (Creative Commons Zero), effectively a public domain dedication. In January 2019 it moved to its own Pixabay Content License, similar in spirit but not identical.
You can download and use content for free, commercially and non-commercially. Attribution is not required although it is appreciated and costs nothing. What you cannot do is redistribute the content unaltered or sell unmodified copies as your own stock. You also cannot imply that people shown endorse your product.
Note that Pixabay does not guarantee model or property releases exist for the people, logos, or trademarks in an image. For a blog header this rarely matters. For a paid campaign it can. The license change also means Pixabay is no longer part of the CC0 pool that tools like WordPress’s built-in Openverse integration draw from, a distinction worth understanding if you assumed they were interchangeable.
Using Pixabay images and videos with MetaSlider
MetaSlider allows you to add both images and videos directly to your slides. Here’s a video guide to this feature:
Using Pixabay images and videos with WordPress
You do not have to leave the admin to add Pixabay images to posts. Instant Images is the best-known plugin for this: it adds a media-library tab that searches Pixabay, Unsplash, Pexels, Openverse and Giphy, and imports your pick straight into WordPress with a filename and alt text you set at import time. Other plugins such as Jetpack, and of course MetaSlider, also provide integrations.
Advice for Using Pixabay Images
Resize before you upload. Pixabay serves originals at enormous dimensions. 5000px wide and several megabytes is normal. Dropping that into your media library means WordPress generates a dozen intermediate sizes from a file no visitor needs. Pick a sensible download size at the source, then let an optimiser like ShortPixel, Imagify or EWWW handle compression and WebP conversion. If you use MetaSlider Slideshow, we’ll resize the images automatically for you.
Write real alt text. Imported filenames like photo-1234567.jpg help nobody. Rename on import, add descriptive alt text, and your accessibility and image SEO both improve for about ten seconds of work.
Pros and Cons of Pixabay
Pixabay’s strength is speed and cost. Its weakness is the flip side: the best images get used constantly, and you have surely seen the same laptop-and-coffee shots across dozens of WordPress themes and demo sites. Quality is uneven, and curation is lighter than at a paid agency.
Treat it as what it is: a large, genuinely free, well-organised library that solves a great many everyday problems. Understand the license, optimise what you import, avoid the overused shots, and it earns its place in your toolkit.