Adobe Stock API key: who can get one, and how to read keywords and downloads without it

Who can get an Adobe Stock API key

Adobe's getting started page for the Stock API, read on October 30, 2026, opens with this notice: “Beginning in November, 2024, the Stock API will only be available to Stock for Enterprise customers.”

The same page adds: “There is no API to get sales data, see top sellers, see creation dates or upload new Stock content.” Your own sales stay in the Contributor portal. What other contributors sell, and how they tag it, is the part a contributor cannot get from Adobe in bulk.

The top downloads of a niche and their keywords

Sort a search by downloads and you get the assets Adobe ranks as the most downloaded in that niche, each with its keyword list, its download count, its upload date and Adobe's generative AI label. This script takes the first 100 photos of that sort for “coffee shop”, saves them in a CSV and counts in how many of them each keyword appears:

import collections
import csv
from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("quarra/adobe-stock-scraper").call(run_input={
    "searchQueries": ["coffee shop"],
    "sort": "downloads",
    "contentTypes": ["photo"],
    "maxItems": 100,
    "maxResultsPerSearch": 100,
})
assets = [a for a in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items() if a["status"] == "ok"]
assets.sort(key=lambda a: a["position"])

with open("top-sellers.csv", "w", newline="", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    w = csv.writer(f)
    w.writerow(["position", "assetId", "title", "downloads", "keywordCount", "uploadedAt", "isAIGenerated", "url"])
    for a in assets:
        w.writerow([a["position"], a["assetId"], a["title"], a["downloads"], a["keywordCount"],
                    a["uploadedAt"][:10], a["isAIGenerated"], a["url"]])

# in how many of the top sellers each keyword appears
counts = collections.Counter(k for a in assets for k in {k.lower() for k in a["keywords"]})
for keyword, n in counts.most_common(15):
    print(f"{n:3d}  {keyword}")

Tested with apify-client 3.3 on October 30, 2026: 100 assets in a 4-second run. The keywords found most often among those 100 assets:

The keywords are the ones Adobe Stock shows in English, where it maps words to its own terms: none of the 100 lists contains “coffee”, while “cafes” is on 94 of them and “hot drink” on 59. With apify-client 2.x, write run["defaultDatasetId"] instead of run.default_dataset_id.

Top downloads against new uploads

The same search sorted by newest, limited to photos added in the past month ("sort": "newest", "addedWithin": "1m"), shows the competition a new upload meets. Both runs on October 30, 2026:

In this niche, the most downloaded photos are years old and carry no AI label, while almost every new upload does. One niche on one day: run the same two searches on yours before deciding what to shoot or generate.

Follow a list of assets

To watch the assets you found, or your own portfolio, give their IDs to the Adobe Stock Analyzer and schedule it on Apify, daily or weekly. With onlyNew and trackDownloads, a run returns only the assets added to the list since the last run of the same watch and those whose download count changed, with downloadsChange, previousDownloads and previousDeliveredOn:

{
  "assetUrls": ["112375286", "291164587", "302682764"],
  "onlyNew": true,
  "trackDownloads": true,
  "watchName": "coffee top downloads"
}

On October 30, 2026, a watch of the first 20 assets above delivered the 20 assets on its first run; run again 14 seconds later, it delivered nothing and charged only the start fee. To catch new uploads instead, the same onlyNew switch on the Scraper with a search sorted by newest returns only the assets the watch has not delivered before.

Limits

• Downloads are Adobe Stock's own counter, not sales or revenue, and Adobe's sort by downloads is its own ranking: it follows downloads, but not strictly. The first result of the search above had 497 downloads, the second 10,756.
• Views are 0 for many assets, even assets with downloads: 22 of the 100 assets above.
• Adobe Stock shows at most 10,000 results for one search. Set maxResultsPerSearch above 10,000 and the Scraper splits the search by content type, orientation, AI label and model release, and skips repeats. On October 29, 2026, “coffee” returned 25,000 distinct assets this way in 257 seconds.
• Asset descriptions and license prices are not available. You get the data and the watermarked previews, never the licensed files.

What it costs

Plus a start fee per run: $0.0006 for the Scraper, $0.0005 for the Analyzer, at the default memory. The 100 assets above cost $0.0606 on the Free plan. Assets that no longer exist, repeats and errors are not charged. Apify's Free plan includes $5 of usage a month.

Questions

How do I get an Adobe Stock API key?

Through the Adobe Developer Console, if your organization has Stock for Enterprise. Otherwise you apply to Adobe's prerelease program, and Adobe says contributor use cases will not be approved.

Is there an Adobe Stock API for contributors?

No. Adobe's page says so in those words, and sends contributors to the Contributor portal for their own sales and uploads.

How can I check the downloads of an Adobe Stock asset?

Give its URL or ID to the Analyzer: each asset comes back with its downloads, views, keywords and upload date, for $0.30 per 1,000 assets on the Free plan, plus the start fee.

Do I need an Adobe account?

No. You need no Adobe account and no API key of your own.