A picture is worth a thousand words. However, it is worth it only if it is of the highest quality and relevant to your content. Otherwise, it is just boring, visually unappealing, and cheesy. If you want to attract new followers or clients with your content, you need to enrich your website or app design with creative elements like images. The same thing applies to other means of communicating with your clients, like social media posts or email newsletters.
However, it is not simple to get hold of high-quality images and stock images. This is where stock image websites come into role. Stock photo websites are libraries of images and stock images that can be utilized by any business that wants to improve its project visually. They let users browse image libraries and then download them. Some stock photo sites offer free, downloadable images for business purposes while others offer paid ones. Such websites usually have a license, which lets you download, distribute, and modify images without the permission of the artist.
What Are Stock Images Websites?
Stock image websites help businesses easily and quickly retrieve images or stock images without requiring a designer or a photographer. Such images are either available for a fee or for free. Businesses can download them and commercially use them. However, before using stock images, they should find the licensing and crediting rules stated on a website to avoid any infringement policy.
If you want to take your professional website to the next level by making it more appealing visually, check out our list of best websites to buy images and stock images.
Why Should You Use Stock Images Websites?
From marketing campaigns to business websites to published content, stock images have many use cases and are used everywhere. Let’s find out some of the key benefits of using a stock image website:
Accessible: A business that does not have a dedicated photographer finds stock image sites to be a highly valuable option. Beneficial for startups mainly, stock image websites can help enhance a business’s visual content without maintaining a creative team in-house.
Versatile: Stock image websites offer an extensive variety of images appropriate for different purposes, including marketing campaigns, published content, and web design. It serves an extensive range of styles, industries, and themes, letting businesses find photos that align with their messaging and brand perfectly.
Time-Efficient: Looking for and downloading photos from stock image websites is faster and simpler than designing custom graphics or coordinating a photoshoot. It helps teams meet very tight deadlines for marketing campaigns and content creation.
Free Search: Many stock image websites let users browse and search their collections for free, decreasing the initial costs of finding appropriate project images.
Professional Quality: Most of the images and stock images are shot and edited professionally on stock image websites, ensuring the best quality standard. This professionalism improves the visual appeal of a business and adds to a polished image.
Cost-Effective: The cost of buying a stock image is much lower than hiring any designer or professional photographer.
The 11 Best Stock Images Websites
1. Shutterstock
It is one of the best and most popular websites to buy images and stock images. Shutterstock offers users more than 600 million licensed and high-quality photos and 45 million videos. Other than stock photos, it also offers access to editorial pieces, vector images, video footage, music, and more. Moreover, you can make and share your collections, create engaging posts for social media using its built-in editing tool, and access Shutterstock via popular applications like PowerPoint and Adobe. Working with a growing community of over 2 million contributors, it adds hundreds and thousands of photos every week. Shutterstock has a plan to meet all budgets, whether you are a large corporation or a large solopreneur.
Price
Shutterstock’s monthly plan comes at $29 per month for ten photos. There is an increase in the price if the downloads increase. You can even buy pre-paid image packs. It offers ten photos for free and a free trial is also available in certain areas.
2. Getty Images
It is a high-profile website to buy images or stock images. Getty Images has more than 200 million editorial, creative, and music assets, and videos for advertisements, print, graphic design, online use, marketing, and in-house design. Just look for a stock image you like and then click on it. Then, you will see different image dimensions (small, extra small, large, and medium) that you can buy. All of them vary in price based on the size. You can also find a wide variety of tools, services, and content available to assist you with your work and make it go right.
Price
You can use Getty Images at $499/download or $375/image, with a discount when you buy photo packs. For large photo requirements, many solutions come without any download limit and various collaboration tools.
3. Envato Elements
This unlimited subscription service caters to the digital requirements of marketers, agencies, and other similar professionals who require lots of stuff. With Envate Elements monthly subscription, you not only get access to unlimited photos download, but you can also get and download plugins, themes, fonts, graphics, music, videos, and more. Besides this, subscribers are open to access eBooks from EnvatorTuts+ and more than 1200 video courses, if they want to educate themselves on how to make the best from the downloaded digital assets.
Price
$16.50 per month
4. Vecteezy
Vecteezy provides millions of high-quality, free stock images. Their collection also has vectors, 4K stock videos, and illustrations. Though most of their resources are available for free, Vecteezy has a Pro resources collection also. You can subscribe to this collection. Pro subscribers can get unlimited downloads no matter what image they choose from the whole collection (stock images or vectors). With budget-friendly prices and unlimited downloads, the Vecteezy Pro subscription can be ideal for hobbyists, freelancers, and designers who often need beautiful content at affordable prices.
Price
Free and Pro Subscription starts at $9 per month for exclusive photos, vectors, and videos. Vecteezy also provides pay-on-the-go credit for Pro resources downloads, which starts at $10 per image.
5. FancyCrave
FancyCrave has a huge collection of stock images and photos that are artistic, full of emotions, and unique, making them ideal. For creatives who want to stand out always from the crowd. You can browse them by categories and preview photo packs also before you buy them. It will help you learn more about the image sets and get some context about the images to provide them the worth they deserve. If you have a limited budget, you can find many free images also to select from.
Price
It is available for free or you can sign up for their membership to access premium collections that have more than 2050 photos and 41 collections for $9.99 per month. If you choose to get the subscription for a year, you can get it for $79.99.
6. Death To Stock
The creators of Death To Stock know how complex it is to find the best images for a project. That is why they designed their photo library membership full of carefully curated photographs. All the images on the website are chosen and tagged meticulously so that users can find what they are looking for with easiness. Users can subscribe to their plan to access more than 3500 photos and video content. To keep everything fresh, they launch a new pack every month for their subscribers.
Price
$399 per year for partners, $21 per month for agencies, and $12 per month for small businesses.
7. StockUnlimited
This stock image website has a portfolio of more than 1 million stock images, icons, fonts, templates, and vectors with its subscription plan at your disposal. Irrespective of your niche, you will find something suitable among its 25 categories. Subscribers get royalty-free, unlimited access to its portfolio and unlimited downloads. StockUnlimited is known to add thousands of new images every week to its portfolio.
Price
For three years, the subscription plan comes at $169, for one year, it is for $79, and for one month, it is for $19. StockUnlimited has a Download pack also, which lets you download a fixed number of images for a fixed price, which starts at $9/10 images.
8. BigStock
Owned by Shutterstock, Bigstock is another reputed stock image photo agency having many years of market experience. It has a collection of more than 55 million royalty-free stock images. Bigstock is a great option to purchase images for sites if you utilize Wix as the CMS as Wix and Bigstock have a partnership, which makes it simpler to add photos from Bigstock to your Wix sites. The agency has top-class images in different resolutions and provides them on-demand easily under a subscription and with credit packs.
Price
Bigstock price is very affordable. Each image costs less than $15 and is as cheap as $0.50/download.
9. Adobe Stock
It is another stock image service by Adobe that is integrated deeply with a Creative Cloud platform. Adobe Stock has a collection of more than 60 million photos under its royalty-free license, appropriate for web use. A solid benefit of using this service is an integration with the Creative Cloud application, which allows you to complete the design process simply and seamlessly and in less time. They have a varied library, which consists of high-quality illustrations and photos that meet the set standard for use in sites. Searching with this website is simple because of its advanced and refined search feature. It is simple to navigate and shows stock photos without distractions. Adobe Stock offers a 30-day free trial and ten free stock photos. Beyond that, you will have to pay for the services.
Price
Adobe Stock has very affordable pricing. You can download an image for just $0.26 or get a subscription for $9.99/month based on the package you choose.
10. Photocase
Photocase is an extremely hip German stock images website with a library filled with artsy, quirky images that convey the exclusive Berlin style. It is an ideal place to purchase images and stock images for sites if you want to build a young, visually powerful, and modern site. Its catalog is curated tightly and small purposely but is still complete and varied. You can find out all types of images with Photocase, like styled stock images. Moreover, all the images are professionally shot and are of high resolution, ready to be downloaded and used. Under a royalty-free license, all the images are safe to use legally and highly flexible for commercial uses.
Price
The images offered by Photocase are priced from $14 to $42 as per their resolution. You can save a considerable amount in bulk purchases via their credit packs.
11. EyeEm
It is an exclusive image and stock images website. EyeEm has a large collection of high-quality and well-curated photos on its website. You can also book a customized photoshoot with this company. It’s an outstanding option for prominent companies who wish for their unique images. EyeEm has an “Enterprise” option for discussing a customized budget and discussing your brand. Though the website is expensive, the images they offer are of the best quality and resolution. So, if your business has the budget, go with EyeEm.
Price
EyeEm’s monthly subscriptions cost $9/ photo for 150 photos. You need to pay $1350/month for their cheapest subscription. For on-demand purchasing, they have two pricy packs. In the first one, you pay $420 for five photos. In the second one, $790 for ten photos.
Conclusion
Using the above websites, you can get beautiful, high-quality images that can make your site look more attractive and professional to prospective clients at the most affordable prices and even free.
