Flim is the reference library that ends the screenshot hunt

Every treatment, moodboard and pitch deck starts the same way. You know the shot you want. Low sun, long lens, someone walking away from camera. You just can't find it, so you spend an hour scrubbing through films you half remember and screenshotting your laptop, then another hour cropping out the play bar.

Flim is built to skip that hour. (And yes, you read that right. It's Flim, not film, although it's about as film as a product gets.)

It's a search engine for visual references from film, TV, ads and music videos. Type what you're picturing and it pulls up matching frames. "Knight on a horse" is the example on their homepage, and it works the way you'd hope: a wall of knights on horses, from very different films, all in one place.

The library

The numbers are big. Flim lists more than 1.5 million stills, 400,000 video clips, 5,800 movies, 2,000 TV series, 15,000 ads, 5,500 music videos and 150,000 animations. It's a genuinely deep well, and the mix matters. Being able to pull a frame from a perfume ad next to one from an arthouse film is exactly how real moodboards get made.

How you search

You can search by describing the image in plain words, which is the part that makes it feel modern. There are also advanced filters for narrowing things down, and a reverse image search, so you can drop in a reference you already have and find more like it. That last one is great when a client sends you a single blurry screenshot and says "more of this."

Once you've found things, you save them to Boards. Boards can be shared with your team or clients, and paid plans add Smart Suggestions to fill a board out and a Canva integration if that's where your decks live.

The AI side

Flim has leaned hard into AI on its Pro plan. You can generate and edit images and video from a prompt, from Flim's own library or from your own assets, using current models like Nano Banana, Veo and Seedance. There are curated Aesthetics to steer the look, upscaling to 4K, and Magic Boards, which build a visual board straight from a script or a pitch.

How useful that is will depend on how you work. For quick treatments and early pitch visuals, turning a script into a first-pass board in a few minutes is a real time saver. For final work, most people will still want real references, which is what the library is for anyway.

The pricing

There's a free plan that's more generous than most. You can search without limits, use the filters and reverse image search, make public Boards and download one still a day at up to 2K.

Basic is €14.90 a month and opens up the full 1.5 million stills with unlimited downloads up to 4K. Pro is €34.90 a month and adds more than 410,000 video cuts from ads and music videos, plus all the AI tools. Teams get custom pricing with up to 50% off per seat, and there's access for teachers and students. Flim also offers local pricing for filmmakers in developing nations, which is a nice touch.

Heads up

The AI features are a big part of the pitch now, and if you only want a clean reference library, some of the product can feel like it's aimed at someone else. The best video features also sit behind the Pro plan, so the free tier is really a stills tool.

And as with any reference library, it's worth remembering these frames belong to the people who made the films. They're for inspiration and internal decks, not for dropping into finished work.

Who it's for

Directors and DOPs writing treatments. Art directors and creatives building pitch decks. Music video and fashion teams who think in frames. Designers who need a visual language fast and are tired of screenshotting Netflix at 1am.

Start on the free plan, search for the shot you've been trying to describe for a week, and see how close it gets.

Written by Steve Salgado