Envato Elements is a single subscription that gives you access to millions of digital assets. Among their most popular products are royalty-free stock photos. Here’s everything you need to know about stock photos available on Envato Elements.
Here’s a full review that covers everything about Envato Elements. As an affiliate, I earn when links in this article are used to purchase (at no cost to you!).
Stock Images Included with Envato Elements
With Envato Elements, we don’t subscribe to individual types of products (photos, videos, etc). It’s all included in a one single subscription. Depending on whether you sign up for a monthly subscription or annual subscription, the cost for everything can be as low as $16.50 per month.
I just wanted to make that clear. You’ll get WAY more than just photos with a subscription.
How Many Stock Photos are Available on Envato?
As of April 2023, Envato Elements includes over 7,713,000 stock images. This amount grows by around 100,000 per week. It’s a very large library!
The images from Envato Elements cover a huge variety of categories, themes and topics. It’s incredibly rare that you can’t find a relevant image when you search for one.
Quality of Envato Elements Stock Images
The quality of the images on Envato is of course subjective. There are many high quality photos (both in general quality and resolution). Of course in a library this size, there are ones of lower quality.
In general, I would rate Envato Elements stock images as much higher in quality than those found on free sites such as Pexels and Pixabay. The available quantity of photos is also much higher than on free sites.
I will say the quality of Envato Elements photos is lower than some premium sites such as Adobe Stock and Shutterstock.
I think this is just a matter of what you can expect to get with an unlimited subscription service like Envato Elements vs paying many times more for single images on premium sites.
Sorting and Filters for Envato Elements Stock Photos
Stock images on Envato Elements can be sorted using helpful filters. This really improves a user’s ability to search through the millions of images to find the one they want. Let’s take a look at the different ways to sorting stock photos on Envato Elements.
Trending and Popular Images
At the top of the image search page is a button to view trending images. To the right will be a list of popular trending categories of images.
Refine Images by Color
Stock photos on Envato Elemnts can be sorted by the predominant color appearing in the photo. This is awesome for narrowing a search for photos that work with a desired theme or color palette.
Search Images by Number of People
A really helpful tool is you can search images based on the number of people (humans) in the photos. Often I will be looking for a photo without people and I can narrow the search to filter out images with people. We can also specify how many people we want in the image. This feature is in Beta but it seems to work well.
Search by Image Orientation
We can refine our image search on Envato Elements to show photos that are horizontal (landscape), vertical (portrait) or square. There are many images in each of these orientations.
Filter Search by Background
Lastly we can narrow our search to only show images with either a blurred, isolated or alpha transparent background.
Envato Elements Stock Image Licensing
All photos from Envato Elements are covered by their general licensing. This is a pretty lenient license that allows photos to be used for personal, commercial and even client projects. There are a number of things to be aware of regarding the license though.
Each time you use an asset from Envato Elements for a project, the project will need to be individually licensed. Here’s how to add additional licenses to an already-downloaded asset.
Envato Elements Stock Photos vs. Pexels vs. Pixabay
Compared to free sites such as Pexels and Pixabay, Envato Elments is a clear winner for stock photos for a few reasons.
The quantity of available photos is much larger on Envato Elements.
Because sites like Pexels and Pixabay offer free stock photos for personal and commercial use, they are used by a lot of people. They’re on blog posts, in YouTube videos and other publications everywhere.
The best part of Envato Elements for photos is you’ll have photos to choose from that aren’t already being used by everyone else.