Sometimes you just look at a photo and think “that would make the perfect header for a millennial-run online store for artisanal, handcrafted goods.” That’s true for basically every photo I could find at Shopify’s new Burst stock photo site, which offers all images it contains completely royalty-free, under the Creative Commons Zero license, which means you can basically do whatever you want with them.
Burst does seem to have content tailored to fairly specific uses and audiences, but it has a fair amount of very high quality, totally free images you can use without having to credit, and which you can also modify. Artists for individual photos are linked, so you can give them some love if you like, which is probably a good idea if your intent is to get rich using their gorgeous visuals to rope in paying customers.
Basically, Burst is another value-add feature to help lower the bar in terms of what it takes for people to start entirely new businesses selling things online with little or no experience necessary. The library’s not super deep based on my limited poking (a search for “horse,” for instance, returned no results) but if you stick to keywords you’d expect to see popping up often on aspirational lifestyle Instagram you’re going to find a good amount of options.
The real value here is that these are free and completely unrestricted in terms of how they’re used, and by who. Bloggers can grab them and remix them at will, as well as shop owners, which is not something you’ll often find from a stock photography site. So go forth, and paper the internet with more pleasing images than what’s been available before.