Women stock photos and royalty free images

Popular images with women include close-ups of women's faces and hair, action images of working or running, and images of emotions like "sad" or "happy." Images of women in social media campaigns or marketing efforts need to draw the eye and capture viewers' attention. Features like hair, eyes, and faces show us highly detailed images of women that we don't see every day. Action shots can pull us out of our office chairs and away from our phones and into the world of activity and movement. Images of emotions are one of the best ways to communicate with an audience visually, and they can set the tone of a creative project. This makes them very popular and highly useful.

A good photo with a woman needs to be an image we can relate to. We look to see ourselves in images of other people — their features and activities and emotions. Images of people can begin to look the same unless their creators use dramatic angles or artistic approaches to creating the image, so taking something familiar like "image of woman" and producing a good photo means accentuating what's unique about the woman in the image. Look for images where women stand out from their backgrounds and bring the image to life with strong contrast, bold colors, and interesting angles. Bold design elements can create visual drama in the image, which will help it stand out among the many millions of images of women out in the digital world.

Searching for images with people is easy. To begin, you can simply scroll down and explore the curated collection of images of women below. We've pulled images from contributors all over the world for this showcase, reflecting the diversity of the images in our library. If you want to look for a specific image, head over to the Shutterstock homepage, and type your search terms into the "Search for images" field. You can refine your search by adding terms like "crowds" vs. "individuals" or "groups" vs. "in-action." Use the results filters on the left side of the page, and you can further refine your results by orientation, image type, color palette, and more. If you already have an image, and you'd like something similar, click "Search by image," upload your image, and Shutterstock's proprietary AI will return similar compositions.

When you're working with images of people in your creative projects, it's essential that you secure model releases. A person's likeness is like a copyright — you can't simply use it without permission. If you do, you could face takedown notices or legal problems. This is why it isn't a good idea to simply download an image off the internet or to use free stock image sites. Every image in Shutterstock's library that features someone's likeness has a signed model release on file. That means you can safely use any images of people you find in our library without fear of likeness issues. Some images of likenesses are for different types of projects, which we keep clearly labeled and identified on each of our photos so you always know exactly what you need.

Photos with women are engaging for creative projects because they inherently contain drama — which is what captures our interest. Every image with a woman will contain actions, emotions, physical details, and other aspects of a living person making her way in the world. Each image captures a unique life, much like our own, and it raises questions about the model that we can never know. For that reason, we answer them ourselves by relating to what we see as familiar in the image — what we already know or have experienced. Drama comes from conflict, challenge, and action, and it's much easier to capture these elements with an image of a person than an inanimate object. For this reason, marketers, creatives, and other people working in design use images of women to tell visual stories in their projects.