1. Am I planning for a timeframe or project?
2. (Approximately) how many images you’ll need.
3. Where you’re going to use them.
4. What colours you want to use.
5. Any themes / promotions you need specific content for?
6. Do you need any specific images with technology or people in them?

If you have all of these things ready, then you can log on to your favourite stock provider and use your answers to start searching. This should help make your search process a lot more streamlined and efficient because… let’s face it, looking at pretty photos can easily take you down a rabbit hole.

Here are my answers to illustrate how this would be done:

• 30 social media posts.
• Instagram posts and stories, Facebook posts, blog posts, Pin images and email images. So, I know I’ll need a mix of square, portrait and landscape images.
• My brand colours are blue/teal, so I want 10-15 in those colours for my pins and emails, and the rest can be any colours.
• May is my Bday, so I want a couple fun/celebratory ones.
• A couple of photos with a laptop, and a phone.

Now, when I log onto Beach Babe Stock I have my game plan with me before I start searching (and don’t get distracted) and I can easily + quickly search for them. Let’s start by searching for the specific photos I know I need; the celebratory ones. First off, for Beach Babe Stock, I would go to the shop search page and do a quick scan of the photo sets to see if I can already see something I like. Otherwise, I would type in “cheers” or “celebrate” in the seach bar on that page, or the top right hand corner of Beach Babe Stock website.

Any photos I like, and click the heart to save them. I found 15 images pretty quickly.

Next, I search by my brand colours “teal” and “blue”, and I find another 15 images that I like and save them.

And finally, I click on the “laptop” and “mobile device” sections in the shop search page and find 2-3 images I like.

I’ve now got 35 images ready, I add them to my cart and download.

This took me less than 10 minutes to do once I had my plan ready!

I hope these tips help you next time you need to grab a batch of stock photos for a project.

If you love the look of our lifestyle stock photos, please join the membership so you can start downloading some of your favourite Beach Babe Stock images today!