LibreStock – do-whatever-you-want stock photos | Hacker News Reader

LibreStock – do-whatever-you-want stock photos

librestock.com

125 pointsdavegri38 comments

OK interface I guess. I don't like that there's nothing about the author of the photo or any other metadata and that you have to click through to (maybe) see that. I would be extremely reluctant to use any of these in a commercial or potentially commercial context without being able to verify and archive the rights clearance information. Also, the tag curation is bad.

If you look at a real stock photo site you see the professionals put in a ton of extra work, eg they'll have maybe 20 photos built around the same model/theme so that if one's not quite right another is, or to give a feeling of depth above and beyond individual pretty photos.

Personally I would not use this service. Stock photography is already cheap and it's already hard enough for photographers to make a living without competition from free, even if it's not free-as-in-beer. I would much rather buy the rights or do the work myself than spend all my time wandering around the Libre Landfill. A term like that might sound cruel or dismissive, but I don't care for the way that the cult of the amateur and the availability of very cheap technology has massively devalued the craft of professional photographers. This is part of a much longer historical trend in which the artistic/creative input to a piece of work is systematically undervalued and more is invested in marketing it than producing it. Selling is important, but the problem is that salespeople generally don't care what they sell as long as they get paid for doing so.

Valid concerns, in a way your right but you can't fight supply and demand there will always be people looking for cheap things and people looking for the best quality things and willing to pay for it. I find that the people who complain that design contests ruined design or that cms's ruined building websites simply need to step their game up and attract higher quality customers who understand their value. it's up to you to prove your value and complaining about the market isn't very useful.

Yeah. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the approach of this site, I've just become skeptical of Free Culture as a source of economic empowerment.

Searching for "hospital" didn't go as expected http://imgur.com/wCfA2Q2

Yeah, I'm working on the search algorithm, sorry for that

It is unfortunate that the suggested example triggers no result.

"0 Results for silly face"

That was the first thing I tried, too. Bummer.

http://i.imgur.com/PC6bYVg.png

A search for "bees" return tons of "beer"-tagged images with nothing bee-related in them.

It also returns actual bees, but why the beer? Is it not an exact match search?

I'd be inclined to believe they trim the 's' to "singularize" the search term, so "cars" becomes "car", etc, then query where " LIKE '%bee%' "

This is an amazing find! I'm wondering if anybody knows of a site for stock music tracks. I'm writing a mobile app (free) in which I want to include some stock music for my app's users to create their mixes but I can't find a single site which allows you to bundle their tracks inside your app. Anybody know anything?

You might try Jamendo. Most (all?) of the music on that site is under Creative Commons license, but I'm not 100% sure if that captures exactly what you want.

thanks so much. your reply really helped me to go in the right direction (looks for music sites with CC license)

I'm really confused. I searched for "water" and it tells me I have 842 results, but then only displays 15 of them and doesn't give me any kind of paging mechanism. What gives?

Edit: I get the intended scrolling mechanism when I page down in Firefox, but not in Chrome.

It is an infinite scrolling page. The rest of the results show up after you scroll down.

That's what I'm saying: they do not. At least not on Chromium 45.0.2454.101 (Developer Build) Ubuntu 14.04 (64-bit).

"but not in Chrome."

Sounds like you need to switch to a high performance browser. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10342407

My mointor is tall enough that at full screen, the entire page fits on screen and there is no scroll bar. In order to trigger the loading of additional results, I have to take the browser out of full screen, resize it to be small enough to make a scroll bar appear, and then finally scroll the page a little bit. Seems like poor design to me. It could be worked around simply by including a "load more results" button at the bottom. If the infinite scroll works, then you'll never see the button. Otherwise it will be there as a failsafe.

Sorry, my bad. fixed now.

Cool, it works now!

Results for "bald" are somewhat puzzling.

https://imgur.com/hrNitqk

It sucks.

http://librestock.com/search/?query=laughing+woman+eating+sa...

I searched for "computer", and I had to scroll down a surprisingly long way to get to anything that wasn't an apple product. I guess photographers are all mac users.

I got different results[1] (2nd picture from the left)

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/MgCrvVu.png

I guess I missed that one (there's also an intel heatsink that shows up quite quickly). Still, at least 95% of the results seem to be apple products.

http://morguefile.com/ is a lot better.

is everything on morguefile public domain?

this is cool, i was using https://unsplash.com/ but their search feature was shity. Can you also setup a favicon for this so i can bookmark it properly?

What is their business model? How do they pay for this bandwidth?

The site only hosts thumbnails. It'd take an awful lot of traffic for bandwidth cost to become problematic, at which point throwing the site behind a free Cloudflare account would soak up 99% of it.

So that's gratisstock, then.

whats gratisstock?

Something else with a hilariously goofy name that will limit its potential.

I think they're referring to the fact that you using the word "stock" in your name is a bad thing. I.e. searching for GratisStock just like LibreStock both yield search results that take me to the "big" stock-image sites, with the keyword being search. I.e. Stock images for keyword Libre, and Stock images for keyword Gratis.

Hopefully it changes if your site picks up steam.

I literally couldn't find a better name that wasn't taken or meaningless, open to suggestions

LibreStock makes sense. I read it as "Libre de droits".

I was thinking of it as a play on the word "free" in french before the word Stock...

    Gratis - Free as in Beer
    Libre - Free as in Speech

But if they're public domain, the are free as in speech. You can modify the images any way you like and then do whatever with the result.

The site indicates things are public domain. That sounds pretty libre to me. Is that not really the case for the underlying media?

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