I've noticed recently almost all broad searches on image search return watermarked stock photos.
It's terrible. The entire stock photo industry is so bad at creativity you can basically instantly tell if a photo is a stock photo, making anyone using them look like a complete fool.
Anyway, they either have some serious legal issues with image search or they are becoming precautionary, but it's becoming almost impossible to find decent images.
>> "The entire stock photo industry is so bad at creativity you can basically instantly tell if a photo is a stock photo, making anyone using them look like a complete fool."
Only the bad, outdated stock photos. There is still a whole market for the "obviously corporate corporate website" corporate website, but that's falling out of fashion.
What you're thinking of are the bland, white backgrounded photos and photos shot in stale, generic office settings so they could be worked into any design. That's not really how it's done anymore. Modern stuff doesn't look posed and staged, and often isn't.
In stock photography, if there are people in it, they can only make money on that image if there are signed model releases. If you have signed model releases, it is staged and posed.
Sure, someone could take a candid image and then after the fact attempt to gain releases. However, that's not workflow with a high margin of success. At that point, the "model" has all of the power. Also, crowd shots in public streets blah blah.
W8 Y? At least in the US I'm generally free to photograph and video anyone I'd like, own the rights to said media, and and do whatever I'd like with it outside of a few explicitly carved out scenarios like fraud or using images of somebody whose career is also their image. Are stock photos one of those carveouts?
It's a common pattern... No good engineer wants to work on a product with their feet stuck in legal quicksand. So all the good engineers leave, and the product stagnates with no direction.
Even if the lawsuit is won, the product is still doomed.
> you can basically instantly tell if a photo is a stock photo, making anyone using them look like a complete fool
I find this to be a highly interesting take...
The whole point of stock photography is that you can buy images to use various projects, quite often one-off or short-term ones. Because for the project, taking your own photos or paying a photographer to take them would be too expensive or time-consuming relative to the estimated value and return of the project.
I feel like once someone has made the decision to buy or use a stock photo, they have already decided where they want to stand on the scale of authenticity and originality. Deliberately seeking out "stock photos that don't look like stock photos" just sounds too much like trying to be something you're not.
It's terrible. The entire stock photo industry is so bad at creativity you can basically instantly tell if a photo is a stock photo, making anyone using them look like a complete fool.
Anyway, they either have some serious legal issues with image search or they are becoming precautionary, but it's becoming almost impossible to find decent images.