Adobe Stock provides access to millions of high-quality, royalty-free images, videos, templates, and 3D assets—plus our Premium and Editorial collections—for all your creative needs. Review these helpful search tips to find the right assets quickly and efficiently for your next project.
There are the various ways you can speed up your search for the perfect image, using Adobe Stock. Here are several examples:
- Curated Collections
- Visual Search
- Undiscovered Content
- Standard Content vs Premium and Video
- Aesthetic Filters
- Copy Space and Isolation Filters
- Conceptual and Real Life Keywords
- Find Similar Content
- Contributor Portfolios
- Boolean Searches
- Editorial Content
Curated Collections
Our team of dedicated, highly-trained curators are continuously adding new collections including popular, seasonal, trending, and lifestyle content for easy browsing and inspiration. You can find the latest collections by visiting any of the content category pages listed on the top navigation of the Adobe Stock website and scrolling down to see the available collections.
You will find curated collections of every asset type including: Royalty-free Images, Video, Templates, 3D Images and our exclusive Premium and Editorial collections.
Visual Search
If you already have an example image–whether from Adobe Stock or another source—you can use that image to perform a Visual Search. This allows you to find content that is visually similar with three options to initiate the search:
- Drag and drop an image into the search bar from your desktop
- Select the camera icon attached to the search bar button to upload your image file
- Click and drag an image from existing Adobe Stock search results
Finding Images From Other Sources
Whether you start your search with a Visual Search or with keywords, you can apply additional keywords or filters to further refine your results. Changing sort order to relevancy is a great way to find something you’ve already seen somewhere else and want to find on our site
The Filter Panel
By default, the Filter panel on the left side of the Stock website is hidden. After your first search, click on the View Filters button to expand the panel. A lot of your options for finding the right image quickly are in this panel.
Undiscovered
Many customers want to focus on content that has not yet been used by others, so we offer a sorting option to prioritize Undiscovered results at the top. The sorting options can be applied to any search result regardless of how it was initiated. Sorting your search results by Undiscovered, rather than the default sort of Relevance, could help you quickly find the right image and one that no one else has licensed through Adobe Stock.
Standard Content vs Premium & Video
You can filter to see only assets that are included in subscription plans or available for download with 1 credit each by applying the Standard Content option. All other assets, including Premium collection images and HD/4K videos, are accessible with the Premium and Video filter option.
Sensei’s Aesthetic & Content Filters
Adobe’s decades of experience in creativity and data science gave rise to Adobe’s artificial intelligence (AI), the Sensei neural network. Sensei is interwoven throughout Adobe tools, from creative desktop and cloud tools and services, to document processing and our digital marketing services.
In Adobe Stock, Sensei goes far beyond keywords, examining tens of thousands of images at the pixel level, to learn about the content and intent of the visual image itself, enabling it to make spot-on recommendations when you search for assets. Aesthetic and content filters use Adobe Sensei to empower your search based on an image’s aesthetic characteristics, such as focus and color or image content.
Depth of Field and Vivid Color
Depth of Field is a photographic term, meaning, the area of apparent sharpness in an image, from front to back. The Depth of Field filter allows you, using a sliding scale, to select images with sharp focus or blurred backgrounds. The Vivid Color aesthetic filter allows you to narrow your search images based on color saturation. The slider enables you to choose lower or higher color intensity.
Copy Space Filter
Using the Copy Space content filter, you can further alter your search by specifying whether the assets you need require room for other design elements, such as text, logos or or other images.
Contributor Search
In order to find specific creative collections (such as Stocksy, GoPro, Twenty20, etc): Perform a search with the ‘Agency Name’ on the Adobe Stock website. The search results will include a link to the contributor page.
Preview Crop
The Preview Crop allows you to visualize what an image would look like using custom or pre-set aspect ratios. It also allows you to zoom in on the image within the Preview Crop to adjust its scale.
Conceptual Keywords
Adobe Stock is continually analyzing assets to understand how they relate to trends, topics, and themes. If you’re looking for emotionally-resonant images, use keywords that evoke the feeling of that trend.
Real Life
Use the keyword ‘candid’ in combination with other keywords to find images of authentic real-life people.
Visual Trends
We forecast visual trends each year. To search for specific imagery related to those trends, filter by premium images and video and simply include the title of the trend that you are seeking in the search bar, ex., “Natural Instincts”, “Brand Stand”, “Disruptive Expression”, etc.
Booleans
When using keywords to search, the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT can be used in the search bar to limit the results of a search. Simply connect words in various combinations to expand or focus results.
Find Similar
Search for images that are similar in look and feel to those you’ve already selected by clicking Find Similar below the image.
Do you like the work of a certain contributor? Simply click their profile name (in blue), found in the image details, to access more of their content.
Editorial
In order to search for editorial content, choose the editorial drop down. Editorial is by default hidden from All, Images and Video.
AP Standard Names
Search with AP standard names, places and events, ex: Academy Awards instead of Oscars.
Editorial Search
The editorial default sort order is most recent not relevancy. In order to get the best results when searching with an image, choose relevancy and use the date filter to narrow by a specific timeframe. To enhance the image search, put in a few keywords such as Place (City/Country), Event (Academy Awards/ Super Bowl), Person's Name (Alicia Keys, Merkel). Make sure to click on Find Similar if you don't find the image in the initial search results.
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