Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) normally fly at low altitudes to acquire high-resolution images covering small regions. The applicability of commercial UAVs finds useful in different domains such as asset management, construction management, real estate, property assessment, as well as disaster response. Security is a major issue exist in the design of UAV networks and can be resolved by the use of effective image encryption technique. In this view, this paper focuses on the design of multiple share creation (SC) scheme with social spider optimization (SSO) based optimal elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) technique, called SC-SSOECC for secure image transmission scheme in UAVs. The SC-SSOECC technique initially separates the color bands (R, G, and B) for every image. Then, the generation of multiple shares takes place for every image which turns to be complex for the hackers to retrieve the original image. In addition, the secrecy of the images can be increased by the use of ECC technique where the optimal key generation process in ECC takes place using SSO algorithm. The SC-SSOECC algorithm is found to be highly secure and useful for practical image encryption in real time systems. An extensive experimental analysis stated the proficient performance of the SC-SSOECC model and the results are examined interms of mean square error (MSE), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), and correlation coefficient (CC).