Shutterstock Reviews

With more than 300 million pictures, you might assume it would be challenging to find your way around Shutterstock’s image library. Well, it’s actually pretty easy. We’ve all used stock media providers where, when searching for ‘web conference’, images of spider webs and face-to-face conferences appear. This doesn’t happen with Shutterstock. The search results are always accurate and are – more importantly – of high quality.

To make things even easier, Shutterstock comes with various search filters. It’s possible to select media by type, size, orientation, color, artist, people’s ethnicity, age, gender, and more. Users can also exclude specific keywords and search similar footage to a file they enjoyed with one click. Plus, all content can be saved in personal collections by clicking on the heart button. This is extremely helpful when you’re looking for various images to use in one presentation or when you want to gather the content you like the most in one place.

Most people know Shutterstock due to its gigantic image bank, but the service offers much more than that. You can also download vectors, video footage, music, editorial, as well as social media and print templates.

As well as Shutterstock‘s massive stock library, the company offers various design tools. You can resize images, convert files to JPEG, PNG, and TIFF, as well as search for color schemes. But the trophy goes to the user-friendly Shutterstock Editor. The platform comes with preset templates for social media, print, email, flyers – just to name a few – and an intuitive drag-and-drop builder. The editor is simple but comprehensive. You can add elements (such as shapes and stickers), text, and upload your own files. The best part is that all these tools are free to use.

Finally, to make the design process more efficient, Shutterstock provides a mobile app to use on the go and various plugins to access its library without leaving the platforms you use the most. These add-ons are available for WordPress, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Creative Cloud, Sketch, Google Slides, and Microsoft PowerPoint. There’s even a Chrome extension that searches for similar images to whatever you find online within Shutterstock’s library.

Since Shutterstock offers specific plans for all stock media types, it takes some time to understand all the different subscriptions and find the perfect plan. There are different subscriptions for images, video, music, and editorial photos. If you’re interested in only one kind of content, we recommend going for one of these. However, if you want a combination, Shutterstock’s Flex subscription is your best option.

For as low as $41.58 per month (with annual billing), you get 25 monthly credits to download images, music tracks, and video footage. Keep in mind that each image costs one credit, each music track four, and each video footage eight. All assets are also available on demand. In this case, prices change depending on the stock media type. As a rule of thumb, the bigger the bundle, the cheaper the unit price becomes.

Businesses that require collaboration between team members can take advantage of the Team subscription. This plan allows you to download up to 750 images each month for $379 (two users) or $409 (up to 10 users). Bigger companies can contact Shutterstock’s sales team to find out more about the Enterprise plan.

Finally, Shutterstock offers a 30-day free trial to try out the platform, which allows you to download up to 10 images. Keep in mind that if you don’t close your account before the trial ends, your subscription will automatically renew to an annual plan. If in doubt, we recommend contacting your credit card provider to block any payments to Shutterstock after closing your account.