Free Image Search API (2026): What's Free, What's Near-Free

Search for “free image search API” and two different kinds of answer come back mixed together. Some pages mean an API for one photo library, such as Unsplash. Others mean an API that returns what Google Images shows. Only one of them is a real web image search.

So here is the honest version. We read the official pages for Google, Microsoft, five free image libraries and eight paid or part-free web image APIs on 23 October 2026, then did the maths on what each costs once the free part runs out.

The options at a glance

First the two official web image APIs most guides still recommend, then the free libraries, then the hosted web image APIs.

Checked 2026-10-23. Sources are linked in each section below.

Two products with one name

An image library API searches a collection that one company owns or curates. Ask Unsplash for “mid century living room” and you get Unsplash photos. Every result sits under the library’s own licence, which is why these APIs are free and why they come with rules about credit and hotlinking.

A web image search API returns what an engine’s image tab shows for a query: pictures from across the web, each with the page it sits on. That is the data you need for image rank tracking, brand monitoring, content research or sourcing candidates. It is also the data that no library can give you, because a library has no idea who ranks in Google Images.

Here is the quick test. If you need a photo for your own site, you probably want a library. If you need to know which images an engine shows, who published them and where they rank, you need web image search. Most “free image search API” guides answer the first question and never mention the second.

Free Google image search API: what is left

This is the variant a lot of people type: “free Google image search API”. Google’s official route is the Custom Search JSON API, and as of today it is a closing door.

On its overview page Google says: “The Custom Search JSON API is closed to new customers.” It adds that existing customers “have until January 1, 2027 to transition to an alternative solution.” The page suggests Vertex AI Search for searching up to 50 domains.

For existing customers the terms are:

• Free: 100 search queries a day.
• Paid: $5 per 1,000 queries, up to 10,000 queries a day, until the service ends on 1 January 2027.
• Image search: the page says you can get image results in JSON. The method reference shows searchType=image, a maximum of 10 results per request, and a hard ceiling: the API “will never return more than 100 results” for a query.

So a new project cannot start on it, and an old one has a deadline. If a tutorial tells you to create a Programmable Search Engine key for image results, check its date.

That does not make Google Images unreachable. Hosted SERP APIs return Google image results as JSON, and they are the options further down. Our free Google SERP API guide covers the web-results side of the same story.

Bing Image Search API: retired

Microsoft’s lifecycle notice is short: “Bing Search APIs will be retired on August 11, 2025.” Existing instances were decommissioned, with no new signups, so no free tier is left.

Microsoft points customers to Grounding with Bing Search in Azure AI Agents, described as a way to “incorporate real-time public web data when generating responses with an LLM.” The notice does not say it returns image lists, so we would not treat it as a drop-in replacement.

If you want Bing image results today, hosted APIs sell them: SerpApi lists a Bing Images API, and Serpent’s engine=bing returns Bing image results on the same /api/images endpoint. For the web-results side, see our free Bing SERP API guide.

Free image APIs that search their own library

These are real, free and well documented. Use them when you need images you can publish. Do not use them when you need to see what a search engine shows.

Read on each project’s own documentation, 2026-10-23: Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay, Openverse, Wikimedia.

Three details are easy to miss.

• Pexels paused new keys. Its page said: “New API key issuance is currently paused and cannot be requested.” We do not know how long that lasts, so check before you plan around it.
• Pixabay and Unsplash disagree about hotlinking. Unsplash requires you to use its image URLs directly. Pixabay says permanent hotlinking is not allowed and asks you to download the files you keep. An app that mixes both needs two code paths.
• Openverse works without a key. Anonymous use is rate limited (see its throttling documentation for the current numbers). Enough to prototype, not to run a product on.

What free really costs you

Free suits a side project. For anything a customer depends on, it hides five costs.

1. You may be buying the wrong product. A library API cannot tell you what Google Images shows for a keyword. Teams find that out after the integration is built.
2. Rules travel with the images. Credit lines, hotlinking, 24-hour caches and download pings are code you write and maintain.
3. A shutdown clock. Google’s API ends on 1 January 2027 and Microsoft’s ended in 2025. A free route that disappears costs you a migration.
4. Small, moving quotas. Unsplash gives 50 requests an hour until you apply for production, Openverse low anonymous limits without a key, and Wikimedia’s limits are new this year.
5. No one to ask. None of the free pages we read promise support.

A worked example. Say you track 500 keywords in an image grid every day: 15,000 searches a month, by our arithmetic. Pexels’ default cap of 20,000 requests a month looks big enough, but it searches only its own library, so those calls would not tell you a single ranking. On Serpent’s Default rate the same volume costs $5.25 a month.

Near-free web image search APIs, one by one

“Near-free” here means pay-as-you-go prices of a few dollars or less per 1,000 searches, or a small monthly plan, plus a free allowance to try it. Each option gets the same checklist: price, free tier, what you get, watch-outs, best for.

Serpent

• Price: $0.35 per 1,000 calls at the Default tier, with no monthly plan. A one-time $100 deposit moves you to $0.32 per 1,000 (Growth), $500 to $0.25 (Scale) and $1,000 to $0.25 (Enterprise). The deposit is spendable balance, not a fee. The minimum first deposit is $10.
• Free tier: 10 free calls on signup, shared across services, plus one free demo run a day on the Image Search API page. Image search is eligible.
• What you get: GET /api/images with engine set to google, yahoo, bing, ddg or brave. Every row has the same eight fields, with null for any value a result did not carry. Filters for size, type, colour, aspect, layout, people, recency and licence, 112 countries and a format=simple row.
• Billing: pay as you go, one flat charge per call. num=100 costs the same as num=10, and the engine you name never changes the rate. Deposited credits do not expire; promotional bonus credits expire after 30 days (see pricing).
• Watch-outs: num is a ceiling, not a promise. Our reference says no engine has been measured returning the full 100 in one call: about 60 on Google, Bing and Yahoo, about 95 on DuckDuckGo and about 50 on Brave. A short answer carries a delivery block. Filter support varies by engine, and the Brave engine takes none of them. There is no pages parameter.
• Best for: image rank tracking, brand and asset monitoring, and anyone who wants a per-call price with no plan to under- or over-buy.

Brave Search API

• Price: the Search plan is $5 per 1,000 requests and its description lists images among the results. The page says “Prepaid credits, no subscription” and “No minimums”.
• Free tier: $5 of free credit every month, which is 1,000 requests by our arithmetic. A banner on the same page says “Up to $20 in free calls every month”, so check which applies to you.
• What you get: a dedicated image endpoint at /res/v1/images/search that returns up to 200 images per request (default 50), with country, search_lang and safesearch parameters.
• Where it beats us: 200 images in one request is far more than any single call from our engines.
• Watch-outs: Brave results only. The documentation lists no size, colour or licence filters.

DataForSEO

• Price: Google Images SERP API at $0.0006 per SERP in the Standard queue (up to 100 results), which is $0.60 per 1,000. Live mode is $0.002 per SERP, or $2.00 per 1,000.
• Free tier: the page has a “Try for free” link but prints no amount, and states no minimum deposit.
• Watch-outs: Standard and Live are different modes at different prices, and the page does not explain how they differ in delivery, so read its docs before you pick.

Serper

• Price: credit packs from $50 for 50,000 credits ($1.00 per 1,000) to $3,750 for 12.5 million ($0.30), with $0.75 and $0.50 steps between. No monthly subscription.
• Free tier: 2,500 free queries, no card. The page does not say whether that is one-off.
• Watch-outs: credits are valid for 6 months. The page lists an Images search type but does not say how many credits an image query uses, so the per-1,000 prices above are per credit.
• Where it beats us: a bigger free allowance, and the lowest rival figure we found, $0.30 per credit, on its largest pack.

SerpApi

• Price: $25 a month for 1,000 searches, $150 for 15,000, $725 for 100,000 and $3,750 for 1 million. It prints plan prices, not a per-1,000 rate.
• Free tier: 250 searches a month, limited to 50 an hour.
• What you get: a Google Images API with ijn paging (0 to 99), a licenses filter and an aspect-ratio filter, plus a separate Bing Images engine.
• Where it beats us: cached searches are free and not counted.
• Watch-outs: the pricing page does not say whether one image search is one search.

SearchApi

• Price: from $40 a month for 10,000 searches ($4 per 1,000), down to $1.50 per 1,000 at 1 million ($1,500 a month).
• Free tier: 100 free requests. The page does not say whether that is one-off or monthly.
• What you get: a google_images engine with a usage_rights licence filter and size values.
• Watch-outs: its documentation does not state a credit cost for this engine.

HasData

• Price: plans of $49, $99 and $208 a month. Its pricing page prints $2.46, $0.99 and $0.69 per 1,000 Google Images requests for those.
• Free tier: 1,000 credits a month, which its FAQ says is 100 image searches, because “One image search costs 10 credits.”
• Watch-outs: $0.69 only applies if you use the whole $208 plan, which is 300,000 image searches a month, and $0.99 needs the full 100,000 on the $99 plan.

Bright Data

• Price: $1.50 per 1,000 records pay as you go, charged only on success. The Scale plan is $499 a month with 384,000 records included and $1.30 per 1,000 beyond that.
• Free tier: 5K records a month, no card. The largest free allowance in the web-image group.
• Watch-outs: the page does not say how many records one image search produces, so we cannot convert “records” to searches with certainty.

What it costs at 1K, 10K, 100K and 1M searches

Per-1,000 prices are how vendors like to be compared. Monthly bills are what you pay. This table prices one month of image searches on the cheapest published plan or pack that covers the volume. The figures are our own sums, not a price offer.

Checked 2026-10-23. Serpent Growth needs a one-time $100 deposit and Scale $500; the deposit is spendable balance, and Growth and Scale use the exact per-call rates ($0.000315 and $0.000245), which the pricing page rounds to $0.32 and $0.25 per 1,000. *Assumes one image search uses one credit, search or record. Serper, SerpApi, SearchApi and Bright Data do not state that for images.

How each column was built. Serpent, Brave and DataForSEO are searches multiplied by the published rate. Serper is the cheapest way to buy enough credits, SerpApi and SearchApi the cheapest plan that fits. HasData is 10 credits a search, so 100,000 searches is exactly the $99 plan’s 1M credits and 1 million is above its largest plan. Bright Data at 1 million is Scale: $499 plus 616,000 extra records at $1.30 per 1,000.

Two things stand out. Plan-based pricing hurts at small volumes: 1,000 searches costs $25 to $49 on four of these and 35 cents on Serpent’s Default rate. And units are not equal: one Brave request can return up to 200 images, so a per-request price tells you little about cost per image. Our image API price comparison normalises that.

A measured claim on price. At the Default tier, Serpent’s $0.35 is among the lowest published rates we found, and below every rival entry price we read. The lowest rival figure on any page was Serper’s $0.30 per credit on its $3,750 pack, which is below Serpent’s Default and Growth rates and above its $0.25 Scale rate (a $500 deposit). DataForSEO’s Standard queue at $0.60 is the closest on-demand rival at small volumes. Credit-bucket plans only reach their printed rate at full use, which we explain in our look at credit expiry.

Search results are not licence-cleared

This is the part that matters most if you plan to publish what you find. A web image search API tells you what exists and where it sits. It does not tell you that you may use it.

Google says so itself on its usage rights help page. Its licence filter works “based on information provided by the sites that host those images, or the image provider”. It advises: “Always confirm an image’s license information.” And it adds: “Images might be subject to copyright.”

Serpent’s license filter relies on the licence a source page states. It is not a verified licence check, so treat it as a first filter, not legal clearance. The same goes for every web image API.

A safe habit for any of them:

• Save the pageUrl and the date next to every image you shortlist, so you can show where it came from.
• Open the source page and read the licence for the exact use you plan.
• For images you will publish, prefer a library such as Unsplash, Pixabay or Openverse, where the licence is the library’s own.
• We are not lawyers: check the site’s terms and your own counsel.

Our guide to checking an image search result before reuse walks through a permission queue, and the source-page audit shows how to use pageUrl as evidence.

How to choose

• You need photos to publish. A library API: Unsplash, Pixabay or Openverse. Check Pexels’ key status first.
• You need to know what Google Images shows. A hosted API with a Google engine. All the web-image options in the table offer one except Brave’s own API.
• You track image rankings or republished assets. A per-call API with a stable row shape and a source page on every row. This is where Serpent is the pick on the numbers above.
• Budget zero, a few thousand searches. Bright Data’s 5K free records, Serper’s 2,500 free queries, or Brave’s monthly credit. All three are bigger than Serpent’s 10 free calls.
• Repeated queries on a fixed bill. SerpApi, because cached searches are free.
• Low on-demand price, or many images per request. DataForSEO Standard at $0.60 per 1,000, or Brave’s API with up to 200 images a request.
• You track several engines. See our guides on the free DuckDuckGo API, free Yahoo search API, free Brave Search API and free video search API.

Quick start: image results in one request

Send your key in the X-API-Key header and name an engine. This asks for large, wide photographs, which is the shape a hero image needs.

curl "https://apiserpent.com/api/images?q=mid+century+living+room&engine=ddg&country=us&num=40&size=large&aspect=wide" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

The same call from Python, using Google Images and the requests package:

import os
import requests

resp = requests.get(
    "https://apiserpent.com/api/images",
    params={"q": "mid century living room", "engine": "google",
            "num": 40, "size": "large", "aspect": "wide", "country": "us"},
    headers={"X-API-Key": os.environ["SERPENT_API_KEY"]},
    timeout=60,
)
data = resp.json()
if not data.get("success"):
    raise SystemExit(data.get("message"))

for img in data["results"]["images"]:
    # width/height can be None when the result carried no dimensions
    print(img["position"], img["width"], img["height"], img["original"], img["pageUrl"])

Each row is flat: position, title, thumbnail, original, width, height, source and pageUrl. If you asked for 100 and fewer came back, the response carries a top-level delivery block with requested and returned. A complete answer has no delivery block, so its presence is the check. The full parameter list is in the API docs, and you can run the same call in the playground first.

Moving over from Google Custom Search

• Google’s num stops at 10 and its results stop at 100 per query. Serpent’s num goes to 100 in one call, as a ceiling, and a call is billed once whatever num is.
• There is no search-engine ID to create: pass q and engine, plus country and language if you need them.
• Filters map across by name: size, type, color, aspect and license are accepted on the Google engine. A value we do not recognise is ignored rather than rejected, so check your spelling.
• Check success and the row count in the body, and cache repeated queries.

For worked builds, see the image search API developer guide, a Python visual SERP monitor and republished-image monitoring.

Limits and what we could not verify

• Openverse limits. We did not verify its anonymous or registered limits; read its throttling documentation.
• Units at four rivals. Serper, SerpApi, SearchApi and Bright Data do not say what one image search uses; the cost table assumes one and flags it.
• Free allowances. We could not tell whether Serper’s 2,500 queries or SearchApi’s 100 requests are one-off. DataForSEO prints no trial amount.
• No benchmarks. We make no claim about speed, success rate or result quality for any service, including ours.
• Prices move. These figures were current on 2026-10-23; confirm them on each vendor’s page before you buy.

FAQ

Is there a free Google image search API?

Not for new developers. Google's Custom Search JSON API is closed to new customers and ends on 1 January 2027. Existing customers get 100 free queries a day, then $5 per 1,000, with at most 10 images per request and 100 results per query. Google image results are now sold by hosted SERP APIs, several with free tiers of 100 to 5,000 searches a month.

Is the Bing Image Search API still available?

No. Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs on 11 August 2025 and closed new signups, so no free tier remains. Its notice points to Grounding with Bing Search in Azure AI Agents, which it describes as a way to add web data to LLM responses, and does not say it returns image lists. Hosted APIs sell Bing image results.

Is there a free image search API with no API key?

Openverse works without a key, with low anonymous limits; check its throttling documentation for the numbers. It searches openly licensed works, not the whole web. Unsplash, Pexels and Pixabay need a key, and Pexels said on 2026-10-23 that new key issuance was paused.

Are Unsplash, Pexels and Pixabay image search APIs?

They are image library APIs. They search their own photo collections, which is why they are free and why they carry rules on credit, hotlinking and caching. They cannot show what Google Images or another engine displays for a query, so they do not help with image rank tracking or brand monitoring.

Can I use images from an image search API commercially?

Not automatically. A search result tells you where an image appears, not that you may reuse it. Google says its licence filter relies on information from the hosting sites and advises you to always confirm an image's license. Check the source page for your exact use. For images you will publish, a library such as Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay or Openverse is safer.

What is the cheapest image search API?

On rates published on 2026-10-23, Serpent charges $0.35 per 1,000 image calls with no plan, $0.32 after a one-time $100 deposit and $0.25 after $500. DataForSEO's Standard queue is $0.60 per 1,000. The lowest rival figure we found was Serper's $0.30 per credit on a $3,750 pack, and its page does not say how many credits an image query uses. Free tiers are bigger at Bright Data, Serper and Brave.

Sources

• Google Custom Search JSON API overview and method reference
• Google Search Help: usage rights
• Microsoft: Bing Search APIs retiring on August 11, 2025
• Unsplash API documentation
• Pexels API and documentation
• Pixabay API documentation
• Openverse API, authentication and throttling and handbook
• Wikimedia APIs: rate limits
• Brave Search API and image search documentation
• DataForSEO Google Images SERP API pricing
• Serper
• SerpApi pricing and Google Images API
• SearchApi pricing and google_images engine
• HasData pricing and Google Images API
• Bright Data Google Images scraper API