How do I find stock images by tag or search?

Every image in the library carries a set of tags, and the tags are the fastest way to move through the collection. Understanding how they are built makes search far more productive than typing whatever comes to mind.

What a tag is

A tag is a single lower-case concept. Not a sentence, not a phrase with three ideas in it, just one word or a short compound that names one thing. Tags describe five kinds of things:

• Subject: what is in the picture, such as lighthouse, bicycle, barista.
• Setting: where it is, such as beach, kitchen, alpine.
• Mood: the feeling it carries, such as calm, dramatic, playful.
• Colour: the dominant tone, such as teal, amber, monochrome.
• Style: how it is rendered, such as minimalist, cinematic, watercolour.

Because the vocabulary is controlled, the same concept is always spelled the same way. A picture of a fox in the snow is tagged fox and snow, never "foxes", "snowy" and "a fox in winter". That consistency is what lets you combine ideas and land on a small, relevant set of stock images instead of a wall of loosely related results.

Chips and tag pages

Open any image page and you will see its tags displayed as chips beneath the picture. Each chip is a link. Click it and you arrive at a tag page, titled "<tag> stock images", which lists every image carrying that tag with the newest first. So the chip labelled harbour opens the harbour page, and from there you can click into any picture and follow its chips onward. Browsing this way, chip to page to chip, is often the quickest route to something you did not know you wanted.

The complete list of tags lives in the tag index. It is worth a look before a big project because it shows the vocabulary the library actually uses. If you are hunting for "sofa" and the tag is couch, the index tells you in seconds.

The search field in the header sends you to /search?q=<word>. It matches against titles, descriptions and tags, so it is more forgiving than a tag page: typing "coffee shop" will surface images tagged café as well as those with coffee in the description. Search is the right tool when you are not sure which tag applies; tag pages are the right tool once you are.

Strategies that work

Start broad. Search a single noun, such as forest, and skim the results. Do not refine until you have seen what the library holds, because the refinement you had in mind may not be the one that matters.

Narrow with a colour or a mood. Once you know the subject is well covered, add a second concept. Open a forest image whose light you like, look at its chips, and click the one that names the quality, such as misty or golden. The tag page that opens will hold forests and non-forests with the same atmosphere, which is often exactly what a layout needs.

Use the tag index to discover vocabulary. Skimming the list once teaches you the terms the library prefers and reveals categories you would never have searched for.

Check spelling variants. British and American spellings, hyphenation and plurals can all send a search astray. The spelling help page lists the terms that are commonly written two ways and shows which form the tags use. If a search for "gray" returns little, that page will point you to grey.

Watch the newest uploads. Fresh images appear first on the all images page. If a subject was thin last month, it may not be now, and a quick look at the latest additions is faster than re-running old searches.

A designer needs a header image for a piece on remote work. Search remote returns too much, so she searches laptop, opens a calm-looking result, and clicks the chip labelled window. On the window tag page she finds a bright desk scene with plants and soft daylight, downloads it, and is done in under two minutes. That loop, search, open, chip, download, is how most people use Affordable Stock Images once they know where the chips lead.