Shutterstock is a popular global provider of royalty-free stock images. This covers high-quality licensed vectors, illustrations, photographs, audios and videos. It offers more than 315 million images and each day, over 181,000 new ones are added. This is thanks to its community of 650,000 contributors.
With this platform, you’re not just limited to all kinds of media. You can also use the mobile application to download images directly from the app. This works for both Android and iOS.
You can also edit images with the Shutterstock Editor. Lastly, you can add more functionality to this software solution by installing plug-ins. The most popular plug-ins include Adobe Creative Cloud, Final Cut Pro, Google Slides, Sketch and Microsoft PowerPoint.
Enterprise solutions are also catered by Shutterstock. You can make use of Shutterstock Premier, Shutterstock Custom or additional API integrations such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple.
Shutterstock Features
Shutterstock provides the Shutterstock Editor Pro, which is an advanced design application that offers a variety of features and tools to create the perfect image for your project. It’s easy and efficient, giving you the right tools to create professional-looking social media posts and promotions. All the plans offered by Shutterstock come with this editor.
This editor comes with the following features:
Full access to design templates
You can choose from thousands of professionally-designed templates. This saves you more time, especially when you don’t have any ideas to create your own posts.
Powerful editing features
You can add filters and emojis to your images. This comes with the ability to transform your designs with gradients, especially with the most popular design style for the year.
Advanced icons
Design elements such as icons are made available for your designs. This can be used for education, marketing, retail.
Text templates
Shutterstock Editor Pro provides professional typography where you can design, edit and customize them according to your preferences. This feature also comes with classic and contemporary layouts and fonts to choose from.
Unlimited custom sizes
You can create and save images according to your preset sizes. This is useful when printing out the right image quality and size for your print projects, digital ads and social media posts.
Unlimited sharing and downloads
Shutterstock lets you download designs and directly share them to your social media outlets.
Shutterstock Benefits
Shutterstock provides users with many benefits, including:
Better customization
With each image you download, you can use the Shutterstock Editor Pro to customize them to your needs. This means adding text templates, logos, icons and more to your templates. What this does is give you more creative freedom and make your images completely your own.
Unlimited access
Shutterstock is one of the biggest providers for stock images in the current market. It offers royalty-free stock images, videos, vectors, audios and photos for your creative purposes. When you’re looking for pictures, you can go through the stock assets curated for you to lessen the time spent on finding the best one. Depending on your plan, you can download multiple images per month.
Large inventory of images
Shutterstock provides users with a large inventory of images to choose from, with both royalty-free and paid images available for use. By having so many images on one platform, it makes the process easier for users to choose the right image for their needs.
Shutterstock Pricing
With Shutterstock, you’ll have a wide range of images for every project. Depending on your plan, images are priced differently.
A free 30-day trial is available. This free account offers several functionalities. You can save and arrange your assets using Collections, share these files with anybody, test out your images before you purchase with downloadable comps and keep track of your browsing history and downloads.
After using this plan, the prices of your images are then priced according to the following: for each image, you’re charged $2.90. For 10 images per month (the annual plan), you’re charged $29.00.
In line with this, the pricing packages are split between two categories: single-users and multiple users.
Single-users
Under this plan, you’ll benefit from the Shutterstock Editor Pro. This lets you create social media promotions and posts within minutes. You also have access to time-saving features and professionally-made design elements. Additionally, you can choose from a variety of templates with the ability to customize an image according to your preferences.
With this plan, you get to save up to 40% per year. This lets you save more, as compared to buying individual pictures. Afterward, each image bundle is priced accordingly. Here are the prices:
For 10 images per month, you’re charged $2.90 per image. Overall, it’s priced at $29.00.
For 50 images per month, you’re charged $1.98 per image. Overall, it’s priced at $99.00.
For 350 images per month, you’re charged $0.48 per image. Overall, it’s priced at $169.00.
For 750 images per month, you’re charged $0.27 per image. Overall, it’s priced at $199.00.
The third plan is considered the most popular.
If you don’t want to subscribe to any plan, you can benefit from the prepaid image pack. This allows you to get images on demand, provided you download within a year. For five images, you’ll pay $49.00, which means each image costs $9.80. On the other hand, 25 images is priced at $229.00 with each image costing $9.16.
Multiple users
This category lets you choose between teams and enterprise. Along with the Shutterstock Editor Pro, it provides you with powerful workflow tools and effective legal coverage required for your work. Here are the packages under this category:
Teams
With Shutterstock, you get to use powerful collaboration tools and share 750 images with your team members per month. If you have at least two users, then you’re charged $379.00 per month. For those teams with three to 10 users, then they’re charged $479.00 monthly. Lastly, if you have more than 11 users then you need to contact the sales team to get a quotation.
Enterprise
Enterprise is fit for organizations and companies that require specific licenses, VIP service and efficient enterprise workflow. Examples of these are CapitalOne and Netflix.
From what Shutterstock offers, it’s clear you’ll benefit more when you require more out of the platform. Each image gets significantly cheaper when you buy more. This is why Shutterstock considers 350 images per month as their best deal; because it provides just the right amount of images at an inexpensive price.
Conclusion
Stock images are used for a variety of reasons such as advertising, promotional work, marketing and commercial use. It’s considerably cheaper than hiring a photographer to capture the perfect shot for you. For graphic or creative designers, they use stock photography for their projects. Now the key nowadays is to look for the right global provider of stock photos.
Shutterstock provides thousands of media for several industries. This includes marketing agencies, businesses of any size and media organizations. It’s considered one of the most popular options for those who need stock photos. If you need large amounts of images, then the pricing plans offer reasonable prices for them.
Overall, Shutterstock is a powerful stock photo provider. It comes with the Shutterstock Editor Pro, which gives you advanced features, unlimited access to a variety of images and the ability to customize these images to your preferences.
You can crop, resize, upload your logo, insert icons and add different texts and shapes to these images. If you’re looking for a solid website to get your images from, then you should consider Shutterstock as one of your top options.
