6 Best Stock Photo Sites for Marketers in 2022

Are you a marketer looking for the best visuals for your marketing campaigns? While there are plenty of stock photo sites, our top picks outperform in quality, affordability, and diversity!

 

Visual marketing is a growing trend, and it’s not going away anytime soon. Once you’re done writing the copy for your websites and social media posts, you will have to start searching for high-end, attractive photos. They are the key to the success of your marketing campaigns and maximum ROI.

 

However, professional photography is not an option for many marketers due to budget constraints and lack of variety. That’s why stock photos are a go-to choice for many commercial projects. They are the most frequently used form of visual content by more than 42% of marketers. And the digital world is filled with stock photo websites offering this content in professional quality. You only have to know where to look!

 

Here, we have created a list of the six best stock photo sites that offer marketers high-resolution and attractive stock images. Continue reading to find more. 

 

1. Shutterstock

 

Shutterstock is a big name among the stock image sites. It hosts around 400 million photos, vector graphics, and illustrations. A substantial amount of content is also added daily to the website from contributors all over the globe, giving you diverse options.

 

Shutterstock offers affordable and flexible pricing plans with tailored support for marketing teams and enterprises.

 

Getting accurate and precise results for each image query is straightforward on Shutterstock. You can get more relevant and personalized search results with keyword phrases. You can further refine this result by size, orientation, color, image type, location, and even the artist’s name. When you preview an image on Shutterstock, it displays the Popularity and Usage score below. 

 

With Shutterstock’s editor, you can edit the image, test it in your project, and even share it with your team. So, you don’t need a separate editor for personalizing the images. In Shutterstock, you can also create catalogs of your purchased images and share them with your team whenever you want. 

 

Shutterstock’s partnership with Facebook has also made advertisers’ picture selection process easy. They have direct access to images from Facebook’s ad creation tool. It allows you to test and try six images for your ad simultaneously and shortlist the most suitable. Shutterstock has also teamed up with HubSpot. Now, users can access high-end unique stock images directly from their HubSpot marketing accounts.

 

2. iStock 

 

One of the best stock photo sites for marketers is iStock. It is a subsidiary of Getty Images and hosts millions of high-resolution unique stock photos. It stands out among marketers primarily because it’s one of the two stock sites with the most exclusive content. You will not find its photos anywhere else on the internet. 

 

There are two categories of photos: the cheapest good-quality Essentials and premium hand-picked high-resolution Signatures. While Essentials are budget-friendly, the Signatures boast outstanding quality and more potential for commercial endeavors. 

 

You can refine these search results by using options like size, orientation, color, ethnicity, license type, upload time, etc. The stock photo site also lets you save images, organize them, and collaborate with your marketing department using Share and Comment features.

 

3. Stock Photos

 

Stock Photos is a popular stock photo site for royalty-free, premium, and affordable images. It offers a wide variety of over 7 million photos. The website has curated collections of popular categories, including healthcare, business, lifestyle, backgrounds, and illustrations. Their website is also user-friendly and makes it very easy to search for the desired photograph. 

 

Another unique feature of Stock Photos is the convenient access to an online AI Image Upscaler. With this tool, you simply have to upload your stock picture and enhance it according to the brand’s vision. 

 

Its pricing plans are pretty inexpensive with no expiry date. Stock Photos also offers coupon codes to avail discounts on many notable stock photo sites like Shutterstock.

 

4. Unsplash

 

Unsplash is a popular website for free stock photos. There are over 3 million usable photos on the website. Since Unsplash is a free website, marketing teams frequently use it. It’s a favorite among small enterprises and marketers with low budgets. 

 

But despite the ‘free price tag,’ Unsplash offers excellent quality. Its search bar is also intuitive and gives you an insight into trending searches, topics, and collections. You can narrow down results by orientation and color. 

 

Sites that offer free photos usually have the disadvantage that their images are everywhere on the web. On the other hand, marketers want less generic images that stand out.. So, to help you find more exclusive photos, Unsplash shows you the number of views and downloads for the image when you preview it. The available stats help you determine if the stock photo has been overused.

 

5. Adobe Stock

 

Adobe Stock is home to over 60 million high-quality stock photos. The vast collection can easily be refined using various search filters like price, orientation, usage rights, size, etc. You 

can also use its ‘Find Similar’ feature to upload any existing picture and find hundreds of similar images on Adobe Stock. 

 

With Adobe Sensei, Adobe Stock makes the best use of AI and machine learning to find the most relevant and personalized stock photos. 

 

Like all other apps, Adobe Stock is also integrated under the umbrella of Creative Cloud. Marketers can access, use, edit, and share their Adobe Stock photos through all apps of Creative Cloud and across multiple devices. It is convenient for marketing teams to work and collaborate smoothly without juggling between multiple apps and browsers.

 

Adobe Stock offers different subscription plans for individuals, teams, and enterprises. 

 

6. Getty Images

 

Getty Images is another leading stock photo site for marketers. It hosts over 350 million images, including contributions from award-winning photographers from all around the world. 

 

It offers an exclusive collection of images that you will not find anywhere. It has two categories of photos: creative and editorial. The editorial collection is reserved for non-commercial projects. But you can use the royalty-free creative collection for commercial projects, ad campaigns, and blogs. You can use the “Search by Image or Video” feature to upload any image and find thousands of similar stock images available in the site’s photo library. 

 

One of the most attractive features of Getty Images is ‘VisualGPS Insights”. It gives insight into trending search terms and images popularity indexes over time, location, or industry. This feature helps marketers make informed creative decisions while planning the visual part of marketing and advertising campaigns.

 

Conclusion

 

Visuals are at the core of digital marketing. People don’t want to read long texts. With users’ attention spans of eight seconds, marketers must go the extra mile to find the most relevant and unique images to attract their target audience. 

 

However, many marketing companies don’t have enough budget to do professional photography for their projects. For some industries, it’s not even possible to take real-time photos. Stock photos are an excellent resource for getting stunning, high-resolution imagery at low or no cost. Our curated guide of 6 stock sites can help you find amazing stock images for your content.