Good alternatives to Google images for finding pictures
Recently it was announced that Google will remove the “View Image” button on Google Images, and you might be looking for a more convenient alternative to find images on the web. Site owners have complained that people can download images from their sites without even visiting the site and view it in its context. It's of course not that hard to just get the images anyway but it makes it a bit less convenient. Anyway, here is a list of some good alternatives to Google Images. Of course, you can always have a look at our complete community-generated list of Google Images alternatives as well!
Free alternatives
Pixabay is a bank of 100% free royalty-free images. Referring a total of more than one million images, illustrations, and photos, you will not have to spend the slightest dollar/euro to download the images that interest you on this website. The site offers 4 main sections to download royalty-free photos, illustrations, vector images and videos.
- Stock Photo Service
- Free • Proprietary
- Online
- Android
- iPhone
- Android Tablet
- iPad
PicSearch performs the best search on the Web, you will find images in a simplified search format, showing file size and dimensions. There is an in-depth search system that provides more information.
- Image Search Engine
- Free • Proprietary
- Online
All photos published on Unsplash can be used free of charge by anyone. You can use them for commercial or non-commercial purposes, the site and photographers will not ask you for credits for that. If you wish to download and use an image discovered on Unsplash on a site or any other communication medium, you will not need to ask permission or give credits to the photographer or Unsplash.
- Stock Photo Service
- Freemium • Proprietary
- Online
- iPhone
- iPad
Add this to the top of your list. Freepik is the leading search engine of free vector designs. Freepik offers users, high-quality graphic designs: exclusive illustrations and graphic resources carefully selected by their design team in order to provide their users with great content that can be used in both personal and commercial projects.
- Stock Photo Service
- Freemium • Proprietary
- Online
Librestock is a multisite search engine that scans and indexes the stock photos from 45+ different websites. They provide you with the biggest searchable database of high-quality free stock photos on the internet.
- Stock Photo Service
- Free • Proprietary
- Online
Like Pixabay, Pexels is a royalty-free image bank 100% free of charge and available under the creative commons CC0 license. Photos can therefore be downloaded, modified and used for commercial purposes.
- Stock Photo Service
- Free • Proprietary
- Online
Avopix offers free stock photos & vectors. All images and videos on Avopix are released free of copyrights under Creative Commons CC0. You may download, modify, distribute, and use them royalty-free for anything you like, even in commercial applications. Attribution is not required.
- Stock Photo Service
- Free • Proprietary
- Online
Commercial alternatives
Don't be fooled by the Google-style presentation. Alamy Images has, today, the largest database of images in stock on the Internet (and you didn't know it?) 125 million images to be precise. This includes all kinds of images including vector images, photographies, 3D, etc... and their search engine is impressive. Try it on.
- Stock Photo Service
- Paid • Proprietary
- Online
Shutterstock contains photos, vector images, illustrations, videos and music in its database. It is an excellent source of photos to enrich the content of a site. To download, all you have to do is subscribe to a package offered by the platform and download the images you want.
- Stock Photo Service
- Paid • Proprietary
- Online
123 RF is a multimedia library with approximately 95 million royalty-free digital content. It is one of the multimedia content providers of major companies such as Google, Apple or Levi's. Every day, the site hosts approximately 35,000 photos of various categories: business, landscape, meeting, lifestyle, etc.
- Stock Photo Service
- Paid • Proprietary
- Online
The iStock site is a relatively well known image bank in the web world. The prices offered by the site vary from one photo to another. The platform offers the purchase of single photos and a credit system that offers users the possibility to acquire a large number of images.
- Stock Photo Service
- Paid • Proprietary
- Online
Photobucket is first and foremost, a very popular storage space in the US, and recently it allows you to search for images on its servers. You will find, among other things, icons, photographs, complete albums on a subject, etc... There is no doubt that there are probably some photographic nuggets in it.
- Image Hosting Service
- Paid • Proprietary
- Windows
- Online
- Android
- iPhone
500px is an online photography community and marketplace. 500px is seen as a place to gain exposure, find inspiration and connect photographers. In addition to hosting stock photography, the site also facilitates direct connections between photographers and clients, enabling customers to book custom photoshoots. As of January 2018, the site had 13 million users.
- Photo Sharing App
- Freemium • Proprietary
- Windows
- Online
- Android
- iPhone
- Android Tablet
- iPad
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
Reverse image search
Tin Eye is an inverted search engine, which will surprise you. It allows you to upload an image, or to specify the URL of an image you have seen on the web, and it searches for images corresponding to that image on the web. Pretty awesome!
- Image Search Engine
- Free Personal • Proprietary
- Online
- Google Chrome
- Safari
- Opera
- Firefox
SauceNAO – like TinEye – is a reverse image search engine. The name 'SauceNAO' is derived from a slang form of "Need to know the source of this Now!" which has found common usage on image boards and other similar sites.
- Image Search Engine
- Free • Proprietary
- Online
NooBox is a Google Chrome extension that provides tools for doing reverse image search with multiple search engines (Google, Yandex, Baidu, TinEye, SauceNAO and IQDB).
- Image Search Engine
- Free • Open Source
- Chrome OS
- Google Chrome
- Firefox
You can also find the whole Google Images alternative list here.
That's a nice list. I didn't know about NooBox. Looks like a cool one.