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The stock photography market has undergone more structural change in the past two years than in the previous decade. If you're choosing where to source images this year, whether for a startup, an editorial publication, or a personal project, the landscape looks nothing like it did in 2023.
Here's where things stand.
The Big Two Became the Big One
In January 2025, Getty Images and Shutterstock announced a $3.7 billion merger, the long-rumored consolidation of the stock photo industry's two largest players. The deal is still grinding through regulatory review (the UK's CMA escalated to a Phase 2 investigation in late 2025), but the direction is clear.
If completed, the combined entity would control a massive share of the paid stock market. Enterprise clients would negotiate with a near-monopoly. Contributor payout percentages, already squeezed, aren't going up. The stated rationale is the usual: synergies, cost efficiencies, "unified licensing solutions."
For individual buyers, the impact is already being felt in posture if not in price. Two companies competing used to keep the market somewhat responsive. That pressure valve is closing.
Unsplash: The Quiet After the Storm
Unsplash's trajectory tells a different story. Getty acquired them in 2021, and for a while, things seemed stable. The free tier remained. The API kept humming. Developers built products on top of it.
Then, quietly, the walls went up.
In 2025, Unsplash deprecated its public Source endpoint, the simple URL-based image embedding that powered thousands of apps. The official SDK was archived. API rate limits tightened. (If you're a developer affected by this, here's how to migrate in 10 minutes. For the full Unsplash story, see Unsplash Was Great. What Comes Next?) New registrations for API access slowed to a crawl, with approval times stretching from days to months.
The message was clear: Unsplash was no longer interested in being the free infrastructure layer for the internet's images. Getty wanted the traffic funneled toward paid products. The firehose became a trickle.
If you built on Unsplash's API, you've already felt this. The product still exists, technically. But the era of "use Unsplash as your image backend" is over. They're a discovery site now, not a platform.
Pexels: Steady, Unambitious
Pexels remains what it's been: a reliable free stock site owned by Canva, doing exactly enough to stay relevant without doing anything surprising.
The library is solid. The search works. The licensing is genuinely free for commercial use. For basic needs like blog headers, social posts, and presentation backgrounds, Pexels delivers.
But there's no apparent innovation happening. No semantic search. No API improvements. No new contributor tools. Pexels is coasting, and that's fine if you just need a free image right now. Less fine if you're building a product that relies on their infrastructure being actively maintained.
The Canva integration is the real product. Pexels exists to feed Canva's design tools. If you're not in Canva, you're not the priority.
Adobe Stock: The Professional Default
Adobe Stock has carved out a comfortable position as the default choice for creative professionals who already live in the Adobe ecosystem. If you have a Creative Cloud subscription, you have credits. If you're in Photoshop, the stock panel is right there.
The library is vast. The quality is high. The licensing is clean. And the integration advantage is real: downloading directly into your project, with proper metadata, is genuinely frictionless.
The downside: you're paying Adobe prices, which are not casual. And if you're not in the Adobe ecosystem, the value proposition weakens considerably. Adobe Stock makes sense for working designers at studios. It makes less sense for indie developers, small businesses, or anyone trying to minimize recurring costs.
The AI Platform Explosion
And then there's everything else.
The past 18 months have seen an explosion of AI image platforms: Midjourney's web interface, Leonardo.ai, Ideogram, Playground, Krea, and dozens of others. Some focus on generation-from-prompt. Some on editing and modification. Some on specific niches like product photography or architectural visualization.
These aren't stock photography in the traditional sense. You're generating images to order rather than browsing a library. But for many use cases, they're direct substitutes. Why search for the closest approximation of what you need when you can describe exactly what you want?
The trade-offs are real. Generation takes time and iteration. Quality varies wildly. Licensing terms differ by platform. And there's the broader question of whether AI-generated images are appropriate for your specific context.
But for speed, flexibility, and cost, AI generation has become a legitimate option that didn't exist two years ago.
The Emerging Middle: Curated AI Libraries
Here's where we fit in, and where a few other platforms are emerging.
OKSLOP and similar services occupy a middle ground: AI-generated images that are pre-curated, pre-generated, and served from a library rather than generated on demand. The value proposition is different from both traditional stock and from prompt-based generators.
Unlike traditional stock, the images are AI-generated (and labeled as such, which is the whole point of our name). Unlike on-demand generators, you're browsing a curated library rather than iterating on prompts. The images already exist. Search is semantic. Download is instant.
This approach addresses a real gap. Not everyone needs custom generation. Not everyone wants to prompt-engineer their way to an image. Sometimes you just need a good image, fast, that happens to be AI-generated and clearly labeled.
We're not the only ones thinking this way. Expect more entrants in this space as AI generation matures and people realize that "generate everything from scratch" isn't the right UX for every context.
The Developer Problem
If you're building a product that needs images (an app, a tool, a platform), your options narrowed significantly.
Unsplash's API deprecation left a vacuum. Pexels API exists but isn't growing. Adobe Stock requires enterprise agreements for serious usage. The Getty/Shutterstock APIs are priced for large-scale commercial deals.
What's left? A fragmented landscape of smaller providers, each with different terms, different libraries, different reliability guarantees.
This is the hole we're actively trying to fill. OKSLOP's API is designed for developers: Unsplash-compatible endpoints, semantic search, free tier that's actually free, clear documentation. Whether it works for your specific needs depends on your requirements, but the developer use case, needing a reliable image API you can build on, is central to what we're building.
What This Means for You
If you're choosing where to source images in 2026, here's the honest breakdown:
For enterprise with budget: Getty/Shutterstock (now merged) remains the safe choice. Deep library, clean licensing, enterprise support. You'll pay for it.
For Adobe users: Adobe Stock is the path of least resistance. The integration alone justifies the credits for many workflows.
For free with minimal needs: Pexels still works fine. Just don't build anything critical on their API.
For custom generation: Pick an AI platform that fits your workflow. Midjourney for quality, Ideogram for text, Playground for accessibility. Be prepared to iterate.
For curated AI images: That's us, among others. If you want the speed of a library search with AI-generated results and clear labeling, this category exists now.
For developers building products: This is genuinely hard right now. Evaluate carefully. Ask about rate limits, pricing changes, and long-term roadmaps. The rug-pull risk is real.
Where This Goes
The consolidation at the top and the fragmentation at the bottom aren't accidents. They're the market responding to AI disruption in predictable ways: incumbents merge to protect margins while new entrants multiply.
In two years, we'll probably see further consolidation. Some AI platforms will fold. Others will be acquired. The developer API space will either coalesce around a few reliable providers or remain chaotic.
What won't change: the need for images. Every website, every app, every presentation, every article needs visuals. That demand isn't going away. The question is just who serves it and how.
We'll update this piece quarterly as the landscape shifts. For now, this is where things stand.
Last updated: March 2026. Have information about changes in the stock photography market? We're tracking this space actively.
