Why you can trust Creative Bloq
Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
The stock image service has been a staple of creative workflows all the way back to when Fleet Street was still on Fleet Street, and the ability to obtain illustrative images of just about any subject you can think of has saved many a project from looking dismal.
The coming together of stock images and AI image generators was, perhaps, inevitable, and so now we have Freepik. It’s a site that, for a monthly fee (though there are free resources), will offer you the ability to generate pictures and videos from text prompts (and you can even expand the prompts with AI too) then generate the results in the cloud before expanding, reimagining, resizing and even relighting, before downloading it to your machine to use in your creative projects. It’s not really photo editing software, but a stock site that will always have photos and videos to your specifications.
Freepik Pricing
• Essential: £4.50/month
• Premium: £8.75/month
• Premium+: £19.50/month
Setup and getting started
• Create an account and you’re in
• Requires a subscription
As Freepik is a web service that runs in the cloud and which you access through your browser, there’s no setup involved beyond creating an account. Ours was upgraded to Premium+ by Freepik for the purposes of this review, but there’s a simple enough interface for choosing the level that suits you.
Features
• Images, video and more
• Generate from reference images
The stock photos are all very nice, but without doubt the major selling point of Freepik is its AI system, which can generate still images and video. The workflow starts with a text prompt, but you can upload a reference image and ask Freepik to incorporate it into your creations too.
User experience
• Slick web interface
• Quick cloud processing
Despite the huge amount of complexity going on behind the scenes, Freepik manages to keep a clean user interface. It’s not exactly simple – there are too many options available for that – and it’s going to take some time to generate exactly what you want, largely because you’ll start changing your mind as the breadth of what the system can do becomes apparent.
Video tools
• Videos up to eight seconds long
• Results can be uncannily good
We’ve had AI image generation for some time, and it’s now capable of making images containing people with the correct number of fingers and teeth most of the time. Video is a different prospect, as it involves a lot more work. Freepik incorporates the Google Veo 2 model for video generation, and is limited to eight-second clips at the time of writing.
Who’s it for?
Freepik is an absolutely enormous service that’s got a lot to offer if you’re prepared to pay the subscription. Its image and video creation tools, along with the reimagining and retouching, are remarkable. The thing is, what you get at the end is an AI-created image or video, no matter how much time you spend refining it, and it’s going to have the problems that always accompany such things.
Scorecard
| Section | Score |
|---|---|
| Setup and getting started | 4/5 |
| Features | 4/5 |
| User experience | 3/5 |
| Video tools | 4/5 |
Buy it if…
• You need custom images and videos quickly
• You don’t mind the ‘AI look’
• You can pay another subscription
Don’t buy it if…
• You’d prefer the real thing
