How to Find Free Virtual Backgrounds for Video Calls

Working from home and doing video calls (online conferences) was not that hot thing before the crises but now, it is becoming a new industry, and a whole set of new updates to every social media app, communication software, and meeting apps are being released.

Everything is happening just to make sure that the people who are working from home could make it professional when they are on video meetings and conferences.

Now another question arises, as people want to hide their messy rooms from video backgrounds, the need to blur or simply replace the background with a professional one. So, many online meeting apps did their best to allow such people to play with their backgrounds. Now the thing is, how we can find free virtual backgrounds for video calls? and this article answers this but first, we will learn:

What Is A Virtual Background?

The virtual background thing is brought to light by the Zoom app that offers its users to upload a custom background in video calls.

A virtual background is a digital background photo or video that you can display behind yourself in a video chat using a consistent lighting, greenscreen feature, or a human-detector feature available in various online conferencing apps like Zoom and Skype.

The best size (aspect ratio) for a virtual background image or video is 1280 px by 720 px and if you are using Zoom app, you can use any size but a picture/video in 1920 X 1080 pixels will work great and make it easier for Zoom algorithms to detect the difference between you and your background.

How to Find Free Virtual Backgrounds for Video Calls?

If you are looking for virtual background images or videos that you can download and use for free with the unlimited license and no investment, you will love this list of websites that offers you royalty free stock images and videos that you can download for free and use as your virtual background for video conferencing on Zoom or any other app that allows you upload a custom background.

1. Pexels

Pexels.com is a great platform to download free stock images and videos that comes with a license to use for private and commercial use without any limits and giving any kind of credit to the creators or Pexels itself. You can visit the website and start searching your favorite video and photos, there will be a simple download button to download your selected images and videos in high quality. This is the best choice for finding free virtual backgrounds.

2. Pixabay

Pixabay.com is bigger than Pexels and they offer the same thing, free stock images and videos that require no attribution and comes in high quality. They offer illustrations also and their art-related images are too good. With over 1.8 million free images, you can download your favorite free virtual backgrounds.

3. Unsplash

If you are choosy and you don't wanna rush for finding a background for your video calls, you can use Unsplash.com as they offer a really awesome set of images and videos that can be downloaded for free and without the need of giving credits to the creators or Unsplash team. They are offering the same services as Pixabay and Pexels.

How to use Zoom app's virtual background feature?

If you are still not satisfied with these websites, you can simply use Zoom App for picking a simple virtual background like an office space scene or clean background and even a space scene background.

They are offering this inside the Zoom app and to use this feature, you need to follow below simple steps:

1. Open Zoom app and go to Settings
2. Click on Virtual Backgrounds tab
3. Choose your background and other settings

That's it, you will see a custom background when you call or set-up a call.

Other Ways to Find Free Virtual Backgrounds

There are a number of ways you can find or even create your own virtual background images and videos without paying a penny.

Your Smartphone Camera:

You can simply use your mobile phone's camera as today's smartphone cameras are able to capture HD and HDR+ images and videos, you can go to a clean and professionally designed office space that is near to you and just record a video there. Just make sure you are recording a video in the right angle as you will be using it as your background. You can capture a few images to test how they look while you are using them as your own free virtual background for video calls.

Google Image Search:

The biggest platform for finding images of any type from millions of websites. Google image search can do the magic for finding best background for video conferencing and we can say that its the best resource for such searches. Simply visit Google and type free backgrounds for video calling and hit the image search option. It will show you hundreds of images and videos that could be used as your video chat background.

If you are still not satisfied with this article about how to find free virtual backgrounds for video calls using websites and tools, then you can comment and leave your question to us.