Explore Royalty-Free Stock Photos & Images

Stock photos are photographs that anyone can license for creative use. Rather than hire a photographer, you can search a large database of photos and quickly find one that works for your project. Learn more about the history and business of stock photography. You can also license other types of stock images, including vector graphics and beautifully drawn stock illustrations.

Whether you're a seasoned professional or someone with a passion for photography, we welcome you to sign up as a contributor. Just go to submit.shutterstock.com to submit an application. Once you're approved, you'll be given instructions on how to upload your photos and tag them so that customers can find them. When you contribute to Shutterstock, you still retain the copyright to your creations, and you receive a royalty whenever a subscriber downloads one of your photos. Read more about how to make money with stock photos.

We've compiled a list of the most popular citation formats from the Modern Language Association (MLA), the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) here.

Downloading stock photos is easy with [Shutterstock](https://www.shutterstock.com "Visit the Shutterstock homepage"). From [vectors](https://www.shutterstock.com/vectors "Download vector images with easy from Shutterstock") and PNGs to JPEGs and any other file formats that best fit your creative needs, there are multiple easy ways to license [images](https://www.shutterstock.com/images "Check Out Images from Shutterstock") throughout the site to download your stock photo with ease. With a wide variety of stock photos with over 600 million images to select for download, throughout the site there are multiple ways to download your photo from red arrows directly on the images, to red buttons that say "Download."