6 Best WordPress Plugins for Finding Stock Photos
There is no doubt that images hold great power, and knowing how to use them on your website will immensely affect the quality of your content. Today it seems like beautiful photos have never been more widespread, and social media plays a big part in that. No wonder there are so many different stock photo resources, both free and premium. Nowadays, you can find a quality photo related to any keyword or topic you can think of. The sheer availability of cameras and photo editing tools makes it possible for everyone to try out the art of photography. This, in turn, created a lot of competition, resulting in very high criteria for what is considered a quality photo.
While not everyone is gifted or interested in becoming a photographer, everyone who manages a website and creates content needs access to quality photos. And anyone who’s ever created content for a website knows how difficult and time-consuming it can be to find the right image that matches the style, tone, and point of an article. Luckily, there is a fairly simple solution for this – a variety of WordPress plugins for finding stock images from your dashboard will save you time and simplify the whole process. The list below includes both free and premium tools:
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Unsplash is a website that offers stock images with a CCO license for free and holds a reputation for offering photos of high quality. If this is the type of stock images resource you are looking for or you are already an Unsplash fan, the Instant Images plugin may be particularly useful for you. This is a free, lightweight tool that allows you to upload images to your website in just a couple of clicks without leaving the dashboard. After the installation, you can set the most appropriate height and width of the images for your website. All the images you choose are automatically resized to fit your set criteria, which is a huge time saver. You can also filter your search results by the landscape, portrait, or square images and edit image metadata easily.
Instant Images integrates with Gutenberg as a plugin sidebar, and also works with the Classic Editor. It doesn’t require you to have an Unsplash account to be able to use it, you just install it and the whole Unsplash repository of free photos is just a click away. Although it is very easy to use and we are sure you can manage all by yourself, in case you need any assistance or simply prefer to have a detailed instruction, have a look at our article about finding and using stock images with Instant Images plugin.
ImageInject is a free, user-friendly plugin that allows you to insert images in just three clicks. It doesn’t require any particular setup after the installation – you can start searching and inserting photos immediately. The plugin automatically adds a practical search metabox to your WordPress editor where you can enter any search term and start your quest for the perfect photo. Attribution is automatically added where required and only images with CCO license are supported so you don’t have to worry about breaching any rules or rights.
The image sources it supports at the moment are Flicks and Pixabay, and the plugin’s developers promise more sources to be available soon in the future. Advanced users can do a bit of fine-tuning of the plugin if needed, as there are a variety of options that allow you to control how images are found and uploaded to your post, and you can also customize the templates and how the images and automatic attribution will look on your page. The plugin works well both with Gutenberg and Classic Editor.
StockPack is a well-rounded tool that supports a large variety of both free and premium image sources. With StockPack you can switch between Unsplash and Getty Images, Pixabay and iStock, and other image providers as per your need. The plugin is easy to use – it adds a media library tab for instant image search and similarly to ImageInject it automatically adds author attribution where necessary. You can also easily rename the files for SEO or any other purpose.
StockPack comes in a free and premium version. With the free version, you are limited to 50 search queries, license inquiries, and downloads per hour, and this is usually just enough for private websites. The premium version allows for 500 hourly requests. The image sources that are supported for now are Adobe Stock, Deposit Photos, Getty Images, iStock, Pexels, Pixabay and Unsplash.
The next plugin on our list is a designer’s favorite. It comes from the Envato Elements service that offers a range of design elements from templates to fonts and more. To use the Envato plugin you have to become an Envato subscriber, but you can browse its collection of premium photos to check whether they have what you need before you commit. You can also opt for a free account that limits you to 12 files per month.
As for the plugin, it works similarly to ImageInject – after you find the image in the Envato photo library, just click the Download button on it and the image is automatically saved in your media library. But, there is no option to set automatic resizing of the images, you have to optimize them by yourself after downloading.
If you prefer to work with Pixabay photos, you are probably not going to need more than the Pixabay Free Images plugin. This entirely free tool is very easy to use – after the installation, no special configuration is required. The plugin adds the Pixabay option via the Add Media button within the WordPress editor. The images that you download are saved in the Media Library and you can use them just like all the other files in your Media Library.
You can download images in different sizes, filter them by color, automatically set the image title tag for SEO purposes, automatically create SEO-ready image names and much more. As Pixabay images are free and come with the CCO license, no attribution or linking back to the source is necessary.
Since Getty Images is well known as one of the leading creators and distributors of top-class imagery and similar multimedia products, the Getty Images plugin is mostly recommended for professional users. It is trusted by many famous magazines and publishers.
This tool integrates seamlessly with WordPress Media Manager and allows you to find and use top-class photos and images from Getty’s repository. Based on your agreement with Getty, you can search for royalty-free or premium images, all of them will be downloaded to your Media Library. You can also refine your search by theme, color, word, category, image type, color, or black and white. And, before posting the image, you get to see a preview.
In Conclusion
Choosing the right plugin for finding and adding stock photos to your WordPress directly from your dashboard will streamline the process of preparing content for publishing and will surely help you bring back the joy of content creation. Bear in mind that images are also important for your SEO and optimizing images for search engines can lead to more traffic, better SERP rankings, and higher conversion rates.
