It is essential to integrate one or more images, without exaggerating, when writing content for a website. These images must perfectly illustrate the subject matter. Of course, you should not take lightly the importance of a photo to illustrate an article. Indeed, images have a direct impact on the visit of a site, as long as they are of perfect quality. In fact, studies have shown that sites with images get an average of 94% of visits.
Currently, you will find a large number of image banks all over the Internet. But you still need to find the best royalty-free image bank for quality content. It is not easy to find it with the mountains of offers on offer. There are paid and free versions. Discover through this article the 10 best royalty-free image banks.
1- Adobe stock: image provider for commercial use
Adobe Stock provides high-quality images, video, and graphics. Currently, this vendor adopts much of the code of its competitors. However, it still has its own unique features, including excellent integration with the Creative Cloud service. The Creative Cloud service significantly enhances the workflow for creative professionals. In addition, Adobe Stock provides users with creative and vector images, as well as royalty-free news photos and video.
This royalty-free image library is available for commercial use, especially for companies that want to enhance their communications and presentation materials. Adobe Stock has a phenomenal database of more than 90 million images, vectors, illustrations, videos, and 3D files. The database service is directly integrated with Adobe service applications such as Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC, and InDesign CC. All images and videos can therefore be viewed directly in the designs.
Benefits of Adobe Stock
Adobe Stock offers the following benefits:
- A surprising choice of photos and vectors,
- High resolution photo catalogs,
- Graphic vectors for design professionals,
- Certification Provided by SCC.
Adobe Stock pricing and subscription plans
Adobe Stock offers users a free one-month trial, regardless of subscription. In total, there are three subscription options available:
- 10 standard images per month for 29.99 euros/month for an annual subscription or 49.99 euros for a monthly subscription,
- 40 standard images per month from 79.99 euros/month for an annual subscription or 99.99 euros for a monthly subscription,
- 750 standard images per month from 159.99 euros/month for an annual subscription or 199.99 euros for a monthly subscription.
2- ShutterStock: a reference in image bank
ShutterStock rises to become one of the largest royalty-free image banks in existence today. It makes available to its users more than 241 million files, of which 180 million are high-quality images and photos. In addition to news images and photos, it also offers videos and music in its database. Customers will have access to hundreds of thousands of music files.
In addition to photos, videos and music, ShutterStock seeks to develop on photos of the day. This includes a catalog dedicated to fresh shots in sports, leisure or crowned heads. These photos focus on the latest news of the moment. The bank adds an average of 200,000 new contents per day. Today, it has around 1.8 million customers worldwide.
ShutterStock has set up a tariff grid allowing all its customers to download royalty-free illustrations legally.
ShutterStock prices and subscription
On the price side, the bank has two types of offers. You can buy a pack of images on a one-off basis. You can also take out a monthly subscription which allows you to make significant savings.
Image pack :
- 5 images for 49 euros or 9.80 euros per image
- 25 images for 179 euros or 7.16 euros per image
Monthly subscription without annual license :
- 50 images per month for 125 euros or 2.50 euros per image
- 350 images per month for 159 euros or 0.45 euro per image
- 750 images per month for 199 euros or 0.27 euro per image
3- Flickr: a Yahoo image bank
Flickr is a platform for storing and sharing images and videos online proposed by Yahoo. It offers its users a free storage space of 1000 GB. That’s enough to register your personal library. You can upload photos automatically via mobile or PC applications. Like Google Photos, Flickr provides an intelligent search tool based on image recognition. This makes it possible, for example, to find pictures of beaches, animals or specific places in a short space of time. In addition, the site has a public or private sharing function. Note that uploaded images are private by default.
How do I create an account on Flickr?
The principle is quite simple:
- Go to https://www.flickr.com,
- Click on register at the top of the screen,
- Fill out the form.
Registration on Flickr will be validated via SMS, so please provide your valid mobile number. Being a Yahoo service, users with a Yahoo account will be identified on the site automatically.
With Flickr, there is more than one way to import photos and videos. Indeed, you can import images by selecting them from your computer. On the home page, press Select the files you want to import or the Import button. You can also simply drag and drop from a Windows folder to the Web window. The file download tracking will be displayed in the top right corner of the screen.
The downloaded images will be displayed in Film format and categorized by date. By default, the padlock icon shows private visibility. This means that only you can view them.
The advantages of Flickr
- This platform has a library containing more than 3 million photos in HD.
- It is possible to use the retouching tools to enhance the photos before downloading.
- In addition to downloading from the platform, you can also join the Flickr community to share inspiration.
4- iStock by Gettyimages: a high-end image bank
Indeed, if you’re looking for a quality image, you can’t do better than choosing iStock, an image bank that offers high quality photos, vector images and illustrations. Whether it is for your blog, your portfolio or your other Internet projects, this platform presents high-end photos divided into many categories, namely :
- Nature and landscapes,
- Work and jobs,
- Health and medicine,
- Fashion and beauty,
- 1Beverages and food, etc.
iStock plug-ins and applications
iStock has 2 interesting plug-ins Adobe® Creative Cloud® and Craft Stock plug-ins. These last ones will be used to facilitate the use of this image bank in association with your image processing software.
This is the case of the Adobe® Creative Cloud® Plug-in, which allows you to find an image very quickly without having to leave Photoshop, Illustrator or inDesign. This plug-in will also simplify the downloading of mock-ups of the iStock images you need for your project.
The Craft Stock plug-in is a powerful and efficient search tool. It will help you find your image from iStock’s extensive catalog. It’s also a great tool for uploading your photos from your active iStock account to your design in Photoshop or elsewhere.
Pricing and subscriptions :
To have high quality images, you have to know how to put a price tag on them. On iStock, you are entitled to 2 different packages:
- By credits for on-demand file choices: from 3 credits for 11 euros up to 300 credits for at least 2000 euros.
- By image subscription ranging from 10 to 750 images and from 1 to 12 months with a price ranging from 26 to 285 euros.
5- Pixabay: more than one million royalty-free images
Pixabay is one of the most reputable platforms for royalty free images. It offers more than a million high quality images on a wide variety of subjects. You can choose between photos, vector images, illustrations or videos. This image bank is perfectly adapted to SMEs, VSEs, startups, craftsmen, associations, self-employed people, administrations and auto-entrepreneurs.
All images and videos on Pixabay are 100% royalty free and published under Creative Commons CC0 license. You are free to download, modify, distribute and use them as you wish. Even for commercial use. No attribution and no request for authorization will be required. You can even use them on social networks, including Facebook.
Features and prices
On the price side, Pixabay is a totally free application. However, additional options can be proposed to best meet your needs. The main functionalities of the tool are knowledge bases. Among the particularities of Pixabay, we can note :
- Compatibility with Mac OSX,
- Web compatibility,
- Compatibility with Windows,
- Software in English,
- Accessibility 7 days a week and 24 hours a day.
6- Unsplash: a completely free image bank
This platform originates from Canada. It distinguishes itself from its competitors by the high quality images published by a community of photographers. With Unsplash, you can select photos by theme, follow photographers and even submit your own photos. You will find images to illustrate projects or an article, but also to use them for commercial purposes. However, Unsplash is slightly different from other image platforms.
Features of Unsplash
Unsplash offers hundreds of images that are all in HD, but above all free and royalty-free. The pictures are under Creative Commons Zero license. In other words, you can copy, modify and share each photo without worrying about copyrights. Each photo is proposed to the platform by Internet users and signed by the name of the photographer.
In addition, Unsplash updates its database every ten days by adding ten new photos. To facilitate its use, it has a search tool using tags. This allows to pre-select photos by categories. That said, without even specifying what you are looking for, exploring the site is a real pleasure because it is so overflowing with varied and original images. Does your blog lack visuals? Does your marketing lack eye-catching images? Are you a serial-photoshopper? In any case, Unsplash is made for you, especially since it is a totally free image bank.
7- Free Images: a detailed search for royalty-free images
https://fr.freeimages.com/
Free Images is a website in French that offers more than 400 000 high quality photos. You can search by category, including :
- By download date,
- By image orientation,
- By resolution,
- By the brand of camera,
- Or by color.
FreeImages contains thousands of images that you can download for free. Thanks to this, this platform is one of the most popular and reliable for downloading images for free.
The advantages of FreeImages
- It is possible to directly enter a keyword to search for a specific image.
- If you want to share the photo via a direct link, it is possible to use the HTML code provided by FreeImages.
- All images in the software are free and 100% royalty free.
- The images can be used for personal or commercial purposes.
8- PicJumbo: another very popular image bank
PicJumbo is a library of free and royalty-free images very recent. So far, the site has only a hundred images per category. But this figure should quickly rise to offer you a large number of high quality images.
This bank offers a gallery of images in HD that you can download for free. Moreover, it is possible to use these pictures for personal and commercial purposes. Moreover, new pictures are uploaded every day on the platform. You will find images with a huge variety of categories including news photos.
The advantages of PicJumbo
- It’s a platform that allows you to browse through pretty photos via the most popular tags.
- You will find unique images made by renowned photographers.
- The selection by category allows you to facilitate your searches, which saves you precious time.
