More often than not designers find themselves meeting with a prospective client and telling them one of the biggest keys to designing a stunning website are the images that you use. You can have the most elaborate interface, with parallax scrolling, fluid, and responsive resizing capabilities, and the best color pallet possible. But if your images were taken with a disposable camera and then scanned, your website is going to look more like a web-fright.
If you’re dealing with a start-up or a smaller client who may be on somewhat of a tight budget, the funds just aren’t there to hire a professional photographer to come in and take standard photos for you to use on the site. So, if you’re looking for the best stock photo websites of all time, look no further! We gathered here some of the most popular stock photo websites you can choose from. Each one of them has millions of stock photos you can browse and buy for your projects.
Stock photo sites are a great resource for the freelance developer. Being able to download affordable, top-quality, professionally edited photos to use in a design will help save you all sorts of time and money. The other nice thing about stock photo sites is that you can use comp versions of the images in your design comps. That way your client will have a better idea of how you intend for their site to look, rather than showing them a layout with a black square and the word “picture” written on it.
Some of them offer subscriptions plans, while for others you just pay per photo. Check out their deals and offers, to get the most affordable prices per photo.
Dreamstime
Dreamstime is among the most popular stock photography retailers, offering high-quality digital images at affordable prices. Surrounding this website is a powerful and active community of photographers from all over the world.
One thing that we really enjoyed about the Dreamstime website was that it had an abundance of images on the homepage, laid out to give the page some design elements. You can click on the thumbnail images behind the search bar to jump directly to that image, or you can search for what you’re looking for. It’s that simple.
iStockPhoto
Not only does iStockPhoto have an image for just about everything you can think of, you can also get free images. This stock photography provider based in Canada, offers millions of photos, illustrations, clip art, videos and audio tracks, with a cost between 1 and 3 credits. The price of credits ranges from $10.00 to $0.22 depending on volume purchased and subscription plan.
Shutterstock
On this website, you can search millions of royalty-free stock photos, illustrations, and vectors. This American stock photography company also offers stock footage, stock music, and even editing tools. The website has over 100,000 contributors! Offering over 17 million royalty-free stock photos, I think it’s safe to say you’ll be able to find the image you’re looking for on Shutterstock. There are a couple pricing options, you can buy a membership and have a monthly limit of 750 images, or you can buy on demand by the photo or by five photos. Shutterstock also offers a free photo and vector image each week.
Getty Images
Getty Images is among the world’s leading creators and distributors of award-winning still imagery, video, music and multimedia products. The website has an advanced search and image recognition technology and plenty of images to choose from. You may have seen the name Getty Images watermarked, or in the caption of, some news stories you’ve read on various news sites. Like iStock, Getty Images don’t stop at just images, they offer music and audio files as well. Unlike iStock, Getty has a pricing scale depending on what the image is going to be used for.
Fotolia
Fotolia is a world-leading image bank. It provides you with instant access to over 80 million images, vectors, illustrations and video clips. There are more than 6 million people worldwide who already use their royalty-free images, graphics and videos. New stock photos are added daily by artists, photographers, graphic designers, and agencies.
Fotolia is a site cut from the same stone as Shutterstock, as they look nearly identical. Along with images, you can also get vectors and videos. They also feature images of the day and seasonal searches that will help you to get your creative juices flowing.
Adobe Stock
Search Adobe Stock for millions of royalty-free stock images. This is one of the largest stock image libraries, available in 20 languages and offering discounted subscription for existing Creative Cloud users. Also, it fully integrates into the Adobe software platform.
Bigstock
Bigstock is a fast and easy-to-use marketplace for quality stock images. They offer over 47 million royalty-free photographs and illustrations, created by some very talented photographers and artists.
Photofolio
This is a unique online stock photography website which allows photographers to share & sell stock photos directly to publishers and marketing specialists. It makes the purchasing process extremely easy and offers some great plans and prices as well.
Alamy
Browse through 100 million stock images, vectors, and videos. Alamy is a diverse stock photo collection with a unique system. It has no subscriptions, no credits, and no need to register! Pricing starts from £9.99 and has content sourced from over 50,000 individual photographers.
PhotoSpin (now closed)
PhotoSpin is a stock photo website offering stock photos, illustrations, fonts, and vector art.
This stock photo website doesn’t use credits and instead offers images through a subscription-based system as well as individual image purchases. It is one of the first companies to offer stock images through an online subscription service at very affordable prices. Their image library consists of millions of images with over 50,000 new images added each month and thousands of new images added daily by talented artists and photographers around the globe.
They have two subscription options: Plus and Super Plus, both with millions of images to choose from, starting as low as $0.06 per image.
The Plus subscription package is the most popular. You can download the stock images with the following specs:
- RGB
- Jpeg & Vector Eps
- 3600px / 12 inch / up to 30MB
- Includes Standard License (Specific Use License can be purchased at an additional cost)
- 1 Year / 1 User ($49.95 for each additional user.)
The Super Plus subscription offers everything available on the Plus plan, but with super-sized images!
- RGB Jpeg & Vector Eps
- 5100px / 17 inch / up to 60MB
- Includes Standard License (Specific Use License can be purchased at an additional cost)
- 1 Year / 1 User ($49.95 for each additional user.)
Use the coupon code WebDesDev10 when you subscribe and get 10% off!
