1. Unsplash.com

Beloved by designers for its high impact splash page images, Unsplash has built quite a solid reputation for itself. They have free high res photos you can use for any personal or commercial projects. It’s rich with high impact images that make memorable landing pages.

2. Pexels.com

Similar to Stocksnap with 100 new photos being added daily. Search by keywords or select by category. And like Stocksnap you can download by size or create a custom size.

3. PIKWIZARD

Over 100,000 completely free images on the site, over 20,000 of those are exclusive to Pikwizard. They are also adding new images to their library daily with the ultimate goal to reach over 1 million images. There are lots of pictures of people, which tend to be rare in free stock photo sites.  All images are free to use without attribution.

If you don’t have PhotoShop you can create Inspiring Designs in Minutes with their Design Wizard – easy to use online graphic design software.

4. Pixabay.com

Free Photos, Free Illustrations as well as Free HD Videos! Select the size you want, and no account needed.

5. Stocksnap.Io

You can search by keywords or browse by popular categories. Order by date, trending, views etc.

6. Gratisography.com

Highly original photos that have an impact. There are a few copyright restrictions but they seem pretty fair to me, and aside from those you can use the photos for personal and commercial projects.

7. Magdeleine.co

A free handpicked high resolution image added every day. You can browse by photographer or use “EXPLORE” to type in your search terms or select by category.

8. Splitshire.com

Easy to follow layout with the standard search option, multiple categories including multiple blurred backgrounds.

9. re:splashed

Free HD images for your projects. Currently no category search but there is the standard keyword search and browse functions.

10. Good Free Photos

This large public domain photo site has over 17,000 photos categorized mainly by location. The site specializes in photos of state parks, national parks, national landmarks, and historical sites. They also have business, tech, animal, plant, and food photos. All photos are free to use for any purpose. Many photos on the site were taken by photographer Yinan Chen who runs the site, and he also takes requests for specific photos.

Please let me know in the comments if I have missed any of your favourite sources so I can consider them for inclusion on this post. Thanks!

They have a 7-day free trial for a short time so we can try out their full membership offering.

Today I did some research on which encryption method is safer for securely backing up extremely sensitive data like my Bitcoin wallet. I’ve been using the most popular WinZip and the free 7-Zip for years to AES encrypt my files (as regular encryption is far too easy to crack). For a while it was very secure but hackers have already identified security weaknesses with AES. So today I moved over, finally, to TrueCrypt thanks to the suggestion of a well-respected friend in the industry who also gave me the anonymous cellphone tipoff. So I’m going to save you some time and run through…

The advantages of switching to TrueCrypt

TrueCrypt is FREE. So is 7-Zip, but WinZip is not.

TrueCrypt’s method involves turning the opened vault into a virtual drive which is way more secure than WinZip or 7-Zip. Every time you open a file inside a .zip archive, they will decompress and decrypt the file straight to a temporary folder on your harddrive. When you close the file, 7-Zip just deletes it which is traceable and can be recovered by unscrupulous people. WinZip securely wipes the temporary file — much safer. But TrueCrypt doesn’t have this problem at all, since the file remains only in the encrypted virtual vault (which is being temporarily suspended/held in your RAM not written your HDD).

Secondly, whether a zip file is encrypted or not, anyone with access to your zip file can still peer at the names of the files inside it which has been a real file-renaming hassle for me in the past. With encrypted .zip files, the password is only required if someone tries to open, view or decompress a file inside it. TrueCrypt does not have this issue at all as the entire virtual volume is completely unviewable until the password is specified.

Finally, TrueCrypt is easier to use because (unless you install it on your USB stick) to Windows your TrueCrypt vault is treated as a regular drive, so once its decrypted you can access the files seamlessly without any hassle just like you would from a USB stick or an external hard drive or a CD, or your regular hard drive for that matter. With .zip programs you can only access the files inside an AES-encrypted .zip file through your compression program, each and every time they are accessed. Such a pain.

The advantages of sticking with .zip software

The total file size of a .zip file is allowed to change dynamically as you add and remove files from the archive. A TrueCrypt vault, because it is treated as a regular drive, has to have a set size. So you have to start by making it big enough for everything you might ever put into it.

And if you’re already using .zip archives all over the place, it will take some time and hassle to switch over to the new format initially.

However I think these small disadvantages are worth the hassle for true encrypted security and peace of mind.

Transaction fees:
Cost to send money: $0.00
Cost to request money: $0.00
Cost to receive $10 or less: $0.00
Cost to receive more than $10: $0.25