There are dozens of free stock photo websites with work from professional photographers. They cannot compete with giant libraries like Shutterstock by volume, but there are many of them. The problem is fragmentation: different platforms, different metadata quality, different search behavior, and often cluttered slow websites. It is impossible to remember all of them, and checking each one manually is inefficient. That is why stock aggregators exist. I built one for Photoshop.
UberStock, a free stock photo aggregator for Photoshop.
Features
UberStock searches images by English keywords and can insert photos into selected regions or vector shapes.
Additional insertion settings are available behind the gear icon at the bottom of the window.
By default, UberStock inserts photos as smart objects and scales them to the selected area. It can also convert the selection into a mask.
If a vector layer is selected, the image can be applied as a clipping mask or replace the shape itself.
How it works
The plugin aggregates photos from popular catalogs:
All images are under permissive licenses: CC0 and Public Domain. These licenses allow broad use, including commercial use, without mandatory attribution or royalty payments.
Clarifai is used for image recognition and tagging.
Download
You can find this and my other plugins at UberPlugins.cc.
If you run into issues or have ideas/suggestions, feel free to message me:
Supported versions
- Photoshop CC
- Photoshop CC 2014
- Photoshop CC 2015
- Photoshop CC 2015.5
- Photoshop CC 2017
Does not work in CS6 and earlier.