Where can I get high quality movie stills?

Four routes, and they are not interchangeable. Free archives like FilmGrab and Movie-Screencaps need no account. Free accounts — ours — add search. Paid memberships like ShotDeck add bulk and resolution. And licensed sources — Getty, Alamy, a studio press office — are the only ones that give you the right to publish.

Reference is not the same as clearance, and no amount of resolution turns one into the other.

The four routes

In order of friction, which is roughly the reverse order of what you are permitted to do with the result.

1. Free, no account
FilmGrab · Movie-Screencaps · FanCaps · Screenmusings
Open a page, right-click, done. Coverage is either curated and shallow (FilmGrab picks 50–70 frames a film) or exhaustive and unsorted (Movie-Screencaps gives you thousands per title). Nothing here is licensed to you; these are reference archives operating the way reference archives have always operated.
2. Free with an account
FrameThrower
A free account sees the full library and its search. Ours — stated plainly because the alternative is pretending this page has no author. $2 of credits on signup, no card.
3. Paid membership
ShotDeck · Flim.ai
A subscription buys access and usually higher-resolution downloads plus bulk tools. Worth it if stills are a daily part of the job rather than an occasional one.
4. Licensed, cleared for publication
Getty Images · Alamy · studio press offices
The only route that actually grants you rights. If the image is going into something commercial, published or distributed, this is the one you need, and the others are not substitutes for it however high the resolution.

What you may actually do with one

Frames from a film are the copyright of whoever made the film. Reference archives — including this one — show them at reduced resolution for commentary, education and study, and that is the basis the whole category operates on. It covers a moodboard, a lookbook, a shot list, a pitch deck you are showing in a room. It does not cover publishing, selling, or putting a frame on something you distribute.

If the image is going out into the world, licence it from Getty, Alamy or the studio. Every frame we serve carries its film, its director and its rights holder burned into the file itself, precisely so the attribution survives the download — our full position is here.

Every source, by what it costs and what it gives you

Free is not the same as licensed. Both are on this table; they are not the same column.

Every source, by what it costs and what it gives you
Source	Best for
FrameThrower(ours)	The deepest per-frame indexing in the category — 75 fields on every frame, which is what makes searching by lighting, lens, shot size, colour and mood possible at all — and for professional integration: a REST API, an MCP server and an npm SDK that studios and platforms call directly
FilmGrabfilm-grab.com	Free, lovingly curated galleries
ShotDeckshotdeck.com	Pro reference behind a membership
Flim.aiflim.ai	Broad AI search across movies, ads and music videos
Frame Setframeset.app	Polished curation with filters
shot.cafeshot.cafe	Tag-based browsing of iconic films
MovieStillsDBmoviestillsdb.com	Sheer catalog size and cast coverage
Movie-Screencapsmovie-screencaps.com	Complete frame-by-frame coverage
FanCapsfancaps.net	Animation and TV screencaps
Screenmusingsscreenmusings.org	High-quality curated galleries of modern classics

Where FrameThrower fits

Full disclosure: this is us. FrameThrower is a movie frame search engine — filmmaker-curated stills from 5,000+ films, every frame indexed across 75 fields by our own tagging team: lighting key and quality, lens character, shot size, framing, colour, mood and film stock look. That depth is the whole difference. Nothing else on this list lets you filter a library by how a scene was lit, because nothing else on this list has recorded it. On frame count we are on par with ShotDeck. And unlike anything else here the library is callable from software — a REST API, an MCP server and an npm SDK — which is how studios and platforms integrate it into their own tools rather than browsing it in a tab. Search in plain language or from a reference image, then build moodboards and lookbooks in the same app. Free to see with an account.