Unfortunately, free stock photos do suck. I've known about unsplash and most of the other resources for a while. This weekend I needed to find some images for

Unfortunately, free stock photos do suck. I've known about unsplash and most of the other resources for a while. This weekend I needed to find some images for a landing page I was creating. The photos you find on websites like death to the stock photo are better quality than most pictures any of us will take. They also have that hipster feel that a lot of start-ups go for with their visual communication. The problem, as semerda has already mentioned is that you have to wait periods at a time to get a small collection of photos. Unless you are extremely lucky, none of those photos will match what you require. The other problem is that ostensibly, photographs with people and face convert far better than images of landscapes or abstract imagery, which is what most of these websites provide. If they do happen to have people then the uncertainty of release is in question (again, already mentioned in this thread). Searching for good photographs is really hard. Especially if you don't want to lax your visual requirements. I ended up spending 4 hours searching for a good image to use on Fotolia, a professional paid-for service. If I stuck to free services, I'd still be searching. What DOES suck about stock photography is understanding the licensing with paid-for sites. A lot of it seems riddled with ambiguity and legalese. For instance, the photos I paid for yesterday - I downloaded them but wasn't asked to provide a domain. Should I be expecting a copyright infringement notice when their bots scan my website? I'll then have to prove I bought the license to use that image. A bit of an inconvenience and sometimes a scary affair. Another thing that sucks is the ubiquity of white people in stock images. Being in South Africa, and trying to serve the South African market as my primary market, I wanted to find great photos of black people. I'll tell you, it's not easy. Also, comparing about 100 photos, I can anecdotally say that images of black people usually cost less credits than those of white people. What I do think they are great for is imagery to use for blog posts. I often use them [1] for blog posts that I write. Just shell out some money for paid photography if you're serious about using photos properly. [1] http://blog.mybema.com/2014/04/10/improving-Mybema-test-suite-time-by-53-percent/ http://blog.mybema.com/2014/04/10/improving-Mybema-test-suit...