Ask HN: Where can I find high-end stock images for a website?

600 points by tixocloud ↗ HN

82 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] thread
I highly recommend it. They have some amazing images.
Since it's sharp rise in popularity around ~12 months ago, it seems like every new website on the internet is using unsplash imagery
Awesome list! I’ve been a death to stock photo subscriber for a while and love their work!
sxc.hu has a pretty good free section
Believe it or not, I've found a decent amount of high quality photos to use on flickr's creative commons search:

https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

Seconding this recommendation. A former hobby of mine was photographically cataloging museum exhibits and uploading them to flickr cc-licensed. I've pulled tons of cc photos from flickr for picture books and other projects. It's a fantastic resource, and only costs you attribution.
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Have a list of those Flickr users or albums? Want to grab them and put them in the Internet Archive before Flickr degrades further under Verizon.
Be careful if the photo includes a person’s face prominently. If it does, the person in the photo has likeness rights in the photo[0] which the photographer cannot assign to you without a signed model release form from the subject of the photo. Most Flickr photographers are amateurs who don’t have model release forms for their photos.

Plenty of lawsuits have occurred around the use of Flickr photos without model release forms (there is also a major sub-plot in the Kevin Smith movie “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” that revolves around likeness rights).

Creative Commons is not enough when there are prominent faces in the photo.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights

Thank you so much!

I had no idea and this makes a big difference with my new website.

That's why it's better to just pay the premium and use getty or another paid stock image site.
Awesome, hn favourited so I can come back to this
I never realized I could favorite a comment on HN. Thanks!

For anyone wondering how: Next to the username of the comment you want to save it will show how long ago the comment was left (ex: "40 minutes ago"). Click on that time and then there is a link at the top where you can click favorite.

Oh wow! Thanks...I've been using HN for years and never realised this was possible!
IIRC it's a relatively new thing in the past year or two... I think
In the past not all images on pexels.com had the correct license or did check the license. We stopped using pexels some time ago.
Great list! Now I'm looking for a similar list for icons. And fonts.
Google Fonts
This is probably off topic and will irritate designers around the world. But personally I disable all custom fonts. I have two. Helvatica equivalent and a monospace. Sizing is limited to 8-14 depending on screen resolution
Another reason to block Google Fonts is that it's (yet another) source of tracking data for them, not sure if you can self-host those though. Personally from the sites I've looked at with and without Google Fonts, it's not much of a loss.
I agree why give google everything? You could try http://brick.im/fonts/ brick fonts is at least a choice.. I have used it and it seems fine..I have yet to expand use of brick fonts but on some sites I see no issues.. nice choice of fonts as well
WHOLLY! Thank you very much. I'll be going through and every one of those. Though judging from the popularity of this thread, probably likely other startups will have the same images as me :)
Hey, yeah its a super good list. As others have pointed out, it really depends on what you wanna do with the picture. A few of my favorites are Stocksy and Cavan. On the more user generated side you have eyeem and 500px. And on the high high end you have getty. Check out Haystack.im and let me know if its helpful.
Thanks. I'll check it out. I just want to avoid those cheesy, unprofessional stock images - just looks tacky and the people in those images look way too fake when we show our website.
If you let us know a bit more about what you are looking for (two people in a coffee shop ; shark attack ; Williamsburg hipster on a penny farthing) and a budget I can put a gallery together for you....
I personally love unsplash. They have a great community and good collection of high-res images.
istockphoto.com

I always start with the free sites, but usually end up using a paid option especially for images that include people. High quality free landscape type photos seem more common.

Train yourself a GAN and parameterise/create whatever stock image you want!
Unsplash is the best in my opinion.

www.unsplash.com

Note that depending how you find an image, the price may be wildly different. I searched on iStock and found an image for 30 bucks. Then when I later went to purchase it, my google search led me to a page where it was listed for $400. I was eventually able to find it on the $30 page again.

For what it's worth, I did most of my searching in incognito windows to try to avoid this type of problem. It sure didn't work this time!