Dreamstime

In 2000, the dreamstime.com domain was registered. According to Dreamstime, it disrupted the stock photography market by lowering image prices manifold, enabling many more photographers to join the industry.⁠[1]

In 2004, Dreamstime began advertising on Google, and the company says it gained a top 3 position in the industry that year; for about a decade afterward, it ranked in the top three organic Google search results for searches related to stock photography. About two-thirds of the company’s customers come to its website from search engine results.⁠[1][2][2][2]

Since 2005, Dreamstime has provided partners with tools to sell stock photography through its affiliate program network, covering more than 45 countries.⁠[1]

Since 2010, Dreamstime has launched additional stock sites, including megapixl.com, which offers images selected using big data on user behavior, and timelineimages.com, which provides images formatted for social media, and it also operates stockfreeimages.com, a collection of free, model-released, safe-to-use images.⁠[1][1]

In 2015, Google revised the “salient terms signal” in its search algorithm, after which Dreamstime’s organic search ranking began to fall. Dreamstime alleges that the drop caused its number of new customers to fall 30% by April 2016. An external search engine optimization expert recommended to Dreamstime by Google’s advertising support team attributed the drop to the site’s weak content, and Dreamstime then invested millions of dollars in improvements, but its Google ranking continued to decline, while its ranking on other search engines did not. Dreamstime contends that the algorithm revision caused the decline, which Google has denied.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2]

In March 2018, Dreamstime sued Google in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that Google maintained a monopoly in the online search advertising market by impeding its use of paid advertising and harming its free search performance, in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act, and asserting claims for breach of contract, breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, and violation of California’s Unfair Competition Law. Judge William Alsup dismissed the monopolization claim without leave to amend on the ground that Dreamstime had not plausibly alleged harm to competition in the online search advertising market, and the remaining state law claims were also dismissed in later proceedings.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][2]

In September 2020, Dreamstime celebrated its 20th anniversary. At the time its library held more than 145 million files, with about 3 million new files approved each month, filtered with the help of its proprietary AI tool PhotoEye, and it had more than 500,000 contributors. After the COVID-19 outbreak, the company introduced measures in March 2020 such as pause plan options and free or discounted plans for NGOs and educational platforms, and it gave contributors 10% extra royalties. Serban Enache said he hoped Dreamstime would remain the artists’ friendly home and the designers’ favorite marketplace.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

On December 6, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court’s dismissal of Dreamstime’s monopolization claim: in the district court, Dreamstime had defined the relevant market only as the online search advertising market, waiving any claim based on the free search market; the unfair treatment it alleged as a Google customer did not harm competition in the search advertising market, and its allegations about free search rankings and Google’s data collection did not constitute anticompetitive conduct in that market.⁠[2][2][2][2][2]

On February 12, 2025, Dreamstime launched an AI keywording tool that automatically generates titles, descriptions, keywords, and categories from an image, which contributors can accept or modify after upload; the tool is based on a proprietary model trained on the company’s own billion-scale collection of images and keywords. Serban Enache said AI assists rather than replaces human creativity. Dreamstime said at the time that it served more than 55 million customers worldwide, with content from more than 1.3 million contributors.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3]

Dreamstime offers a searchable collection of tens of millions of stock photos for purchase and millions of free images, and its business relies heavily on traffic from search engines. In 2022 the company was based in Romania; its 2025 press release was datelined Brentwood, Tennessee, United States.⁠[2][2][2][3]

Dreamstime: Official website: https://www.dreamstime.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]