Tutorial: Licensing and downloading images with the Shutterstock free API subscription
Lots of people are familiar with downloading Shutterstock images directly from shutterstock.com to use in marketing, advertising, and news content. What most of our small and medium-sized customers don't know is that when they search for images or download images from the website, they're using the same computer interface that our enterprise customers use to connect their huge systems and applications to our media catalog. The only difference is that enterprise customers access Shutterstock directly through a computer interface called a REST API, cutting out the need to visit shutterstock.com.
Why use the API?
The API is a toolbox of commands that computers can use to access Shutterstock media and services.
Computers can access the API directly, instead of going to shutterstock.com in a web browser, which allows our partners to do things like:
- Write programs and apps that bring our media catalog directly into their media libraries, just like how our plugins for Adobe Photoshop® and Microsoft PowerPoint® pull our media into your projects
- Incorporate our services like reverse image search and custom music generation in their applications. For example, this hackathon application helps people learn languages by using reverse image search to identify objects in photos: Shutterstock ConUHack Winner: Interactive Language Learning with Computer Vision.
- Run lots of searches in a short amount of time. For more information on how the API allows rapid application scaling and growth, see The 5 Ways Creative Platforms Use the Shutterstock API to Drive Growth.
This tutorial covers how to set up an API subscription, search the Shutterstock API, and license and download free images. From there, you can use what you learn about the API to write programs and apps that access the tools that the API provides.
What can I do with the API?
With the API, you can do nearly everything that you can do on shutterstock.com and much more, including:
- Searching for images, audio tracks, or videos
- Uploading images for reverse image search
- Getting information about your account
- Licensing and downloading media
- Creating and adding items to collections
- Generating custom music
The API commands that run these tasks are called endpoints and these (and many more) are covered in the Shutterstock API reference.
Most programming languages have tools that can access REST APIs, which makes it easy to access APIs like the Shutterstock API from whatever programming platform you want to use.
Prerequisites
The free API subscription doesn't require any payment information or pre-existing Shutterstock accounts.
Getting started with an API client
To access the API, you need to install an API client, a program that can send HTTP requests to the API and receive responses. The tutorial includes installation instructions and examples for the following clients; you can use one of these or any REST API client that you are familiar with.
You need to set up only one of these clients. The tutorial provides separate instructions for the client that you choose, so pick a client and click the link to the tutorial instructions for that client:
| API client | Description | Tutorial instructions |
|---|---|---|
| Postman | A full-featured client that helps you create, send, and save HTTP requests in a graphical user interface | Postman tutorial instructions |
| Shutterstock command-line interface (CLI) | A straightforward list of commands that you type into the command-line terminal on your computer | CLI tutorial instructions |
| Shutterstock JavaScript SDK | A package of commands that you can use in Node.JS programs | JavaScript tutorial instructions |
| cURL | A command-line program that is availalable on most operating systems and sends HTTP requests to URLs that you specify | cURL tutorial instructions |
Choose one of these clients and follow the tutorial instructions for that client.