When beginning a project or campaign, visual cues are a necessary part of the process. Whether for the purpose of teasing out ideas, evoking inspiration, or communicating concepts to colleagues, visual media is integral to most creative work. Stocksy galleries, like mood boards, are creative tools that assemble collections of stock media assets to pull ideas together, surface unique content, and streamline stock media licensing processes from inspiration to iteration.
What can Stocksy galleries do for you?
Make stock media moodboards
Stocksy galleries are valuable tools for kickstarting the creative process. Pulling content from various searches into a central location helps to reign in a concept and keep the style and aesthetic of a campaign or project consistent. Across teams, galleries act like mood boards that communicate a project’s visual cues without the need for excess verbal explanation. Nobody wants to have to imagine what a campaign looks like. Show the people.
Nail pitches and win clients
Speaking of showing the people, colleagues and co-workers aren’t the only ones that can benefit from galleries. When putting together a deck or visual presentation to pitch a project to clients, having quality stock images in a gallery format helps to communicate concepts succinctly and turn pitches into won work.
Save time and resources with galleries
Once your pitch wins over your client or boss — they love the concept and the imagery is beyond expectations — the grueling work begins, right? Time to scour and scrape the internet for the stock photos, videos, and illustrations you need for your project? No way. Using Stocksy media galleries in your pitch decks means that your imagery is already approved and ready to work with. You can start mocking up ads, brand videos, and emails right away.
Ready to purchase? Save time and resources by licensing your whole gallery or create a smaller gallery of final picks and add to cart from there. Just click “Add gallery to cart”, enter your size requirement, payment details, and have all your licensable stock media visuals in an instant.
Our team uses Stocksy to simplify content selection. The creative director makes a selection of assets in the custom gallery for the design team to incorporate into their materials to reduce unnecessary back and forth with content selection. Once the design assets with watermarks are approved, the design team can make stock media purchases using the credit that had been approved by the team lead, which also helps us process each transaction faster.
How to create your first gallery
Collect your content
To start your gallery, hover over your first photo, video, or illustration of choice. When the hover menu reveals the plus sign, click on it (it will also show “add to gallery” text so you know you’re in the right place). A pop-up menu will appear, prompting you to add to an existing gallery or create a new gallery. Type in the name of your new gallery, press enter or tap the checkmark button, and voila, your gallery exists and is ready for more content.
Add more content to galleries with the same steps, but instead of creating a new gallery, tap the + button to add the asset to your gallery.
Rearrange content for an enhanced visual experience
Now that you have added a number of stock media assets to your gallery, it looks inspiring and on brand, but you wish you could group similar assets together. Great news — you can do that. Arranging your gallery’s imagery by color, copy space, people, sub-theme, or whatever you like, further enhances the visual experience and strengthens your intended communication.
Click the crossed arrows icon on the top left corner of an asset and drag and drop to anywhere in your gallery.
Tips:
- Breaking vertical assets up by horizontals or wide shots helps the eye to read images and concepts easier
- Move strong or important content to the top of your gallery
Use the Select Tool for bulk moves
Move to top or bottom
When you want a selection of visuals to sit at the top of a gallery or, conversely, sit at the bottom, you can move them all without having to drag and drop each asset individually.
Click the circle icon in the top right of an asset within your gallery. This will illuminate the select options directly under your gallery title. You can now select several stock media assets and move to the top or bottom.
Delete or copy to another gallery
You can also use the select tool to delete assets you no longer want in your gallery, or — we particularly love this one — copy assets to another gallery. Being able to copy multiple assets to a separate gallery can seriously save precious time when multiple mood boards are needed for similar concepts or you’re ready to present a shortlist gallery.
Looking for more stock media inspiration?
Once you’ve added a number of stock media assets to your gallery, perhaps you’re done with searching and are ready for some recommendations. Time to try out some Stocksy similarity options. How exciting.
In the top right of the navigation menu you will find three AI-powered Stocksy content surfacing tools: Visually Similar, Conceptually Similar, and Deeply Similar. Each of these designer-inspired services are engineered to offer recommended stock media based off of your gallery’s contents — each witha different perspective to offer.
- Visually Similar shows more assets with similar color and composition to your gallery
- Conceptually Similar offers content with similar models, style, and mood to your gallery
- Deeply Similar is the next iteration of Conceptually Similar with different parameters to surface potentially more comparable imagery to your gallery
Learn more about our proprietary Visual and Conceptual Search tools here.
Collaborate across individuals and teams
Galleries aren’t relegated to introverted creatives and solopreneurs, they are designed to be collaborative and easily shared. Invite collaborators and set permissions from admin to editor to keep the ideas flowing and the process tight.
Click the “invite” button in your gallery navigation panel and enter your collaborator’s email address. Select permission from the drop down menu and they will receive an email inviting them to contribute to your gallery
Editors: Can add, remove, delete, and rearrange assets in a gallery collection.
Admins: Can do all Editor actions as well as change the collection name, update privacy settings, invite or remove collaborators, and delete the gallery.
Sample galleries
Need help visualizing how galleries can be used to convey concepts, ideas, and observations? Have a look though our Curated Collections cache of themed galleries created by our Marketing, Design, and Artist Relations teams.
We love these galleries because they offer many opportunities for our clients to:
- Find relevant content that keyword search won’t surface
- Access hidden gems in the collection
- See traditional subject matter from conceptual angles
- Gain easy access to the newest Stocksy content
- Get inspired with new creative possibilities
Get inspired by our Curated Collections and maybe even copy some photos, videos, or illustrations over to your own gallery.
Creative Research can make galleries for you
Our clients (you) often look for concepts, feelings, and other attributes that are difficult to keyword. Search limitations can make assets difficult to find.
Some clients look for very common content, but have particular needs that speak directly to their brand, which requires expert search skills to narrow down search results, and then hours of scanning to find just the right content.
Creative Research is a content research service offered to all Stocksy clients. Our team receives creative briefs or other content-related needs from our clients, and in turn creates galleries of relevant visuals that best meet their needs.
Our Creative Research team is intimately familiar with our collection and how to surface content and are ready to create galleries tailored to your brand and project’s needs. Learn more about Creative Research here or reach out to [email protected] to get started.
