Royalty Free Beach Photos

Ah, the beach.  

Nothing invokes feelings of relaxation or contentment like the feeling of sand between the toes, the sound of the waves crashing on the shore, or a whiff of the smell of the salty breeze.

These pictures are all related to time on the beach.  Some are of the sand – others of the life guards patroling the ocean to keep swimmers safe.  We have some more of umbrellas and loungers.  Hopefully these pictures will be useful in your 

A beach is a lively area situated in which the land, the air, and water all come together. It might be described as a zone of unconsolidated sediment (i.e., loose sandy stuff) deposited by water, wind, or glaciers across the shore, between the very low tide line and the upcoming important landward shift in topography or makeup. This shift may be natural feature like a pond, or even a human-made structure like a seawall.It’s true that most beaches are made up of sand.  However, sometimes the fragments might be as big as boulders, or composed of another substance besides sand. A beach might be made of something like carbonate skeletal or shell fragments. Resources of beach material comprise sediment transported by rivers or generated from even the seafloor or biological substance like coral.

When we first launched Free Media Goo almost 20 years ago, there weren’t any completely-free-to-use pictures available.  We set about rectifying that.  Some of these pictures are from when we first started out, while others have been added throughout the years.  All of these photos are free to use without attribution – though feel free to cite us if you’d like to.

At some point, we might launch a gallery of photos that are free to use but require attribution.  We’ve resisted this because we don’t want to complicate matters for our users, but it does limit the amount of photos we can offer up to you for use.  For now, we’ve decided we’ll just link out to other sources that provide attribution-required citations.  If you do use work from the following sources, make sure you abide by their license terms.

How to download our stock background photos:

You’ll find our selection of background photos below.  We’ve included them all in a gallery format – you should be able to quickly scan and find any pictures that will work for your creative project.  If you see one you wish to download, click on the picture.  That will bring up the highest resolution image we have available.  Since we’ve been on the web since the late 1990’s, we have photos in ALL different sizes.  There was a time that 640×480 was considered high-definition, believe it or not.Right click on that image, and select “Save As…” to download the photo.If you have questions, please let us know.  This site is run as a labor of love, so our response time might be measured in days rather than hours.  But if we can help you with your royalty-free image question, we’ll get back to you at some point.