How to add stock photos to a layout directly in Adobe InDesign

Stock photography platforms Unsplash, Pixbay and Pexels have become reliable resources for designers and content creators worldwide.

The royalty free-to-use image platform allows creators to download high quality and professionally composed photographs for use in all sorts of projects.

Generally, creators would have to visit the websites mentioned above in order to download images and use them in projects.

However, an Adobe Creative Cloud Extension called Stock Solo allows full access to a searchable library containing 3.2-million photos built right into InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to access this extension as well as how to download and place photos into an InDesign editorial design spread.

Stock Solo Extension for Creative Cloud

1. First, activate the extension on by going to the Adobe Exchange website, and clicking the Install button to download the Stock Solo app.

2. In either InDesign, Photoshop or Illustrator, go to Window > Extensions > Stock Solo to access the library.

3. From here, you can look for specific images in the search field.

4. Once you have found an image, hover over the thumbnail for other information such as size and photo credit.

5. Click on Place to download the file to your local drive as well as place it in your project.

Depending on which Adobe app you're in, the image will either be dropped into the workspace, such as Photoshop or will be loaded in your cursor ready to drag onto a page or art board, such as InDesign and Illustrator, respectively.

This is a great addition to Adobe software as it gives you more options to use stock photography,