The Best Image Search Engines on the Web (2024)

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An image search lets you search the web for pictures of all kinds, from portraits and clip art images to black and white photos, illustrations, line drawings, and more.

There are lots of image finders out there. Some are search engines that scour the web for photos and continually update their database with their new findings. Another way to search for pictures is from websites that host images but don't necessarily crawl the web to find new ones.

Below are the best image search tools I've used. They let you search for pictures, browse through galleries, and even run a reverse photo search to find a picture that looks like the one you have.

Image Search Engines

Search engines work by having you trigger the search by a word, phrase, or another picture. They gather results from other websites on the web.

• Google Images: Google's massive image database is always my go to for finding pretty much any picture on any topic. An advanced search can narrow in on a particular size, color, time, and more.You can also use Google to search for an image using another image as your search query instead of text (i.e., reverse image search).
• Yahoo Image Search: The image search on Yahoo is similar to these other picture search engine sites: there are advanced search options to filter the results by license, size, color, and more. This one is ideal if you're looking specifically for GIFs or portraits.
• Bing Images: Microsoft's Bing has trending sections to make it easy to see popular people, nature, wallpaper, and GIF searches. Unique filtering options help you do things like find photos with a head and shoulders in them, or transparent pictures.
• Yandex: Unique features offered by this image search engine include the ability to easily restrict your image search to a specific website, find wallpapers that match your monitor resolution, list only photos with a white background, and locate just PNGs or GIFs.

Image Search Sites

These image search sites are great for browsing pictures as well, but they keep their search within their respective websites.

• Pixabay: This site includes millions of high-quality stock images and videos, including vector graphics and illustrations. It helps you find trending and new photos uploaded by its users. This is just one of many public domain image sites that you're free to use without copyright issues.
• Flickr: An awesome image finder for locating a huge array of different photos—tens of billions of photos, in fact. Some of these images can be reused, but if you're just looking for fantastic photo galleries from talented photographers worldwide, Flickr can still be a useful source.
• Getty Images: Huge database of searchable images from various leading brands. The curated collections are a great way to find themed photos — Business and Industry, Conceptual Trends, and Modern Family are a few I've seen. This image search site offers different levels of access depending on what you need it for.
• Hubble's Images: Amazing pictures of space objects as collected by the Hubble telescope. There are thousands of photos here that you can filter by topic, collection, and type.
• X (formerly Twitter): This social media giant lets you run an image search across every publicly accessible account, or just the people you follow.
• LOC Prints & Photographs Online Catalog: From the Library of Congress, these collections include Ansel Adams photography, Civil War, Presidents and First Ladies, and lots more.
• The Smithsonian Institution Archive Collections: Run a picture search or browse through selected images from Smithsonian collections.
• Classroom Clipart: A source for free downloadable clip art, searchable by topic. These are great when making birthday cards and illustrating ideas for kids.
• Eastman Museum: This is a museum of photography and cinema. Use their image finder to search through a wide variety of collections, including Moving Image and Technology.
• National Geographic Photography Collection: This image search site includes photo galleries from this acclaimed magazine, gorgeous wallpapers, a photo of the day, and more.
• NASA Image and Video Library: Search thousands of NASA press release photos, videos, and audio recordings spanning American manned space programs from the Mercury program to the STS-79 Shuttle mission.
• NYPL Digital Gallery: Updated daily, this is the New York Public Library's collection of free digital images. Use this lookup tool to access hundreds of thousands of images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities to find illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more.
• Openverse: WordPress' Openverse lets you browse hundreds of millions of creative works, including free stock photos, images, and audio. There's a filter that lets you find items you can use commercially, and license filters. This is one of the few image search engines that helps you find SVG files.

Reverse Image Search

Ever wonder how many websites are using the same image? Or maybe you need to identify something in a photo, and you don't have the words to describe it. You can do these things with a reverse photo search.

There are several methods to this, but the idea is the same: you provide an image for your search query instead of text. For example, rather than looking up image results for house, if you want to see pictures that look like the one you have, you feed the search tool the house picture you have instead.

A Google reverse photo search is one way to do this. Bing Visual Search, Yandex Visual Search, and TinEye work similarly. If you're on a mobile device, check out our article on how to do a reverse image search on a phone or tablet.