DreamstimeReviews 1,260

Best stock image out there. Straightforward and too the point with a great search engine to find exactly the photo or vector item needed for your piece.

After paying for 15 images and subscribing to a monthly fee program it would let me download in a very high resolution, when i opened it i was shocked.
I paid for a image with watermarks and they ask you to pay more to remove the watermark.
Do not use this site its a scam

I've been subscribed to Dreamstime for about a year now, and in that time have cancelled my subscription twice only to renew it again after they sent me a discount offer.

First, the good.

Dreamstime has a wide selection of the types of images that I like.

Content discovery is also pretty good due to the fact that on each image they will also provide more images of the same kind, more images featuring that model/location and more images from the photographer.

Those two combined mean that I have downloaded a lot of images from the site over my subscription period.

Now the bad.

As I said, I've cancelled twice in that time only to be tempted back by slashed prices. Why? Because the site is INCREDIBLY frustrating to use and although they claim that feedback is important, I've raised my concerns with them on multiple occasions and nothing has changed.

If you view too many photos in a short period of time when just using the site at a casual pace, it will suddenly decide that you must be a bot and it will present you with a page where you must hold down your finger on a button for a period of time to prove that you are a human.

But this test often doesn't work, failing to return you to the site. It just hangs there. Refresh the page and you have to start all over again. Try another image instead and you have to try all over again. I've done the test 5 times in a row and it still wouldn't let me back in.

The real kicker is that it does this even for logged-in users with active subscriptions and hundreds of downloads available on their account! Lol!

If I've paid for 500+ images every month, why would it even matter if I was using a bot to download them? As long as I'm just downloading the images I've already paid for, who cares how I do it, right?

Except I'm not even using a bot to download images - I'm just casually opening images in tabs, viewing them and then deciding if I want to download them or not. Like a normal human would do.

Even for the short period of time that you are able to view and download images before the site decides that you are a bot and locks you out, the downloads are incredibly slow. You hit the download button and then have to wait 3-5 seconds for the site to finally decide to give you the file. Multiply that across however many images you have in your download allocation for that month and that is a LOT of waiting around looking at loading spinners.

I've saved a list of the images that I want to check out and I am slowly working my way through the images every month. Once I've checked them all out, I plan to cancel my membership for a third and final time purely because of how frustrating and terrible the user experience is.

These pieces of utter trash keep stealing photos that i'm publishing on my blog. I've attempted to contact them several times with little response, of which is always the same copy-paste message claiming it's theirs, and little else. Even a photocopied cease-and-desist won't get them to stop. These people are no better than those thieves at Getty.

The trail was confusing, I realized after signing up that the free images are watermarked. No problem, I canceled my subscription because I didn't want to forget about it and chose to buy credits instead. Right after buying them I download the file & my balance reads 11 credits, as well as 15/15 free images. The weird thing is the 15 ticked down to 14 and my credits stayed the same when I refreshed the page.

Not sure if my next 14 images will work like that as well but if so then the trial is great its just not explained well. Seems like it's only truly useful if you're a paying customer.

I'd recommend anyone that needs an image from them just buy some tokens, maybe you'll get some free images from it.

Dreamstime has been repeatedly harassing me claiming I've used their images without permission and am violating their copyright when I have purchased the stock photos in question from other websites and have a 100% valid license.

I've received four emails from them now on four separate occasions each time demanding I provide them with receipts and personal information proving I've purchased licenses for the images.

I'm at a loss as to what to do. I do not like having to provide my personal information over matters I'm being accused of that I didn't do.

If it happened once I could maybe suck it up but this has happened four times now.

No other stock photo site has harassed me like this. I've purchased several stock photos from Dreamstime over the years and will never do so again.

I've included a screenshot of the most recent email I've received. You can see they're using Google Campaign tracking URLs so this is all just a money making scheme to scare people into purchasing their license.

I tried the 1 free week offer. Turns out, with the free week, you still have the watermark on every images. It's an additional $25 to remove them. Yeah, not for me, I decided to cancel my subscription.

I went to my account, found the right place to cancel my renewal, and clicked cancel: password is required. Ok, no problem, my password is in my Chrome password manager. Password Incorrect, I can't cancel.

I tried to log out and log in, the password works.
I just can't cancel my renewal and can't use the images downloaded since there is a watermark.

I wrote to the support center and expecting them to fix it within 24 hours, else I'm gonna call my bank to block the payment.

I have had NO problems of any kind with Dreamstime products and delivery. I have had issues that were self created and when I call them to fix it, the issue was fixed before I hung up the phone.

This outfit really leads you on. You sign up for free trial as the hook. Then they want an extra $25 upgrade to your free account, or your downloaded images will still have watermarks on them. They should be way more upfront about that. When you are in free mode all you get is essentially preview copies. They have good images but the come on free approach is not appealing. Just be honest and say for $25 you can get 15 images per month.

Just now tried in vain to find out how many credits an image was. Only after I bought the lowest number of credits (11) did the cost show. I ended up using all credits for 1 image, at a smaller res than I would have liked (but thanks Gigapixel!). That and when I went to pay by Paypal, my 11 images had turned into me buying 500 images. Glad I caught that one. May have been a slip of my mouse but... hmm. Also, just now, had an email saying my purchase failed (it didn't - checked paypal) and wants me to go back with a 5% discount (?) or sign up for a subscription (ah...). What a weird site...

Where do I begin? If you happen to find a photo that has their watermark-just run away! They show it is a "free download" right? So you create an account and they show varying plans. They offer a plan for $4.99 to have unlimited downloads of their "free downloads" right? So when you pay the $4.99 and go back to get your photo that showed it was free it now shows you have to purchase credits. They also don't have the option to remove your credit card number from their file. RUNNNN or they'll hold your credit card number. I'm contacting my credit card company now to find out if this is even legal. They are scammers.

*Update-I contacted them saying I felt mislead. They refunded me and gave me a 1 image credit. So I'm happy with the way they handled it. But I'm still leery.

Thanks Gladys for assisting me with my query. You were very helpful, knowledgeable and super efficient. Much appreciated!

Please don't waste your time, their sit is not working properly, they offered me 10 free images before I would commit, but their site conveniently charged my credit card twice in January. I contacted them and got no response. I canceled my membership but got charged again in March, I did not authorize this charge. I contacted them, got no reply. I contacted my credit card co, resulted in Dreamstime deleting my account and still no return of my funds. Big scam, images average

Okay, so I get that they have to make their money somehow, and people could really just ge the images they want on the "free" trial... what they don't tell you is that the images you are getting are watermarked--completely useless to me.

I wanted a few images, to try something out, and would consider furthering my subscription if it worked out... but I have no use for watermarked images so I'm cancelling 5 minutes after subscribing.

Misleading pitch to get your credit card details - relying totally on the fact you may forget to remove your card details

I had to cancel my credit card and missed updating it on Dreamstime. I emailed them to advise them of my oversight and asked if my previous credits (which was a lot) be reinstated. They responded to my email quickly and reinstated my credits. I have been using Dreamstime for a few years now and love what they offer. I can always find the right image.

We are a cash+carry Wholsale and use from time to time grafics and pictures for our displays. The reason, why we love dreamstime ist the fact, that thes are very up-to-date and offer a wide selection of new and different grsafics and pictures at good price