Show HN: Cosmic Media – Search millions of stock photos and videos | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Cosmic Media – Search millions of stock photos and videos

46 pointstonyspiro10 comments

Hello HN,

I’m Tony, the CEO of Cosmic (https://www.cosmicjs.com), we provide a headless CMS and API toolkit to create and deliver content to websites and apps. Today, we are releasing Cosmic Media which enables you to search millions of high-quality, royalty-free, stock photos, videos, and vectors from popular online media services: Unsplash, Pexels, Giphy, and Pixabay from one convenient interface. It also includes AI-generated images from OpenAI. Check it out here: https://cosmicmedia.vercel.app

We built it to solve our own need to consolidate our existing media extensions, which were individual media extensions using the Unsplash API and Pexels Video API, and we thought, "why not combine them into one"? Rather than search from different stock media websites, seems like it would be nice to aggregate it into one interface. Then we sort of thought about what else might someone want for adding media to their content, so we added DALL-E AI image generation. We've been using it internally and find that it's saved us some time when searching for media to add to our blog posts.

We are offering it as both a stand-alone open source tool and as a Cosmic extension which can be added to your projects for easy access during content creation from the Cosmic dashboard. Check out the code and feel free to customize and extend it to suit your needs: https://github.com/cosmicjs/cosmic-media-extension

Let me know what you think in the comments.

- Tony

Is this legal?

I would expect image libraries prohibit this type of usage in ther TOS. Why would they do all the hard work and then let someone else build a similar service on top of it?

Pixabay for example prohibits distributing their content "on a Standalone basis" which seems to be what you are doing when you offer to download the images:

https://pixabay.com/service/terms/

How come Google and Bing get to do this?

I don't think you can download full resolution Pixabay images from Bing or Google.

Oh wow, yeah, that is pretty egregious. I thought it was just another indexing/search thing, but there's not really any attribution or anything, just a download button. Yikes.

Same with the Pexels API. Their Terms & Conditions help page [1] and license page [2] state:

> The Pexels License does not include: > > • the right to compile any Pexels Content to replicate a similar or competing Service;

and

> Don't redistribute or sell the photos and videos on other stock photo or wallpaper platforms.

[1] https://help.pexels.com/hc/en-us/articles/900005880463-What-...

[2] https://www.pexels.com/license/

You're violating the TOS for at least 3 of these sites...

And by not providing attribution information I'm pretty sure you're violating the licenses of most of the images you're retrieving, a number of which are uploaded to specific sites and are therefore subject to the TOS and licenses provided on those sites, which your CMS/API whatever doesn't retrieve.

Note that the penalty for copyright violations is theoretically $75k per violation and when a copyright is violated it doesn't matter if the material is royalty free.

I feel it would have been easier and safer to just utilize and AI trained on stock images.

Hitting all the APIs on every keystroke. Who released this?

This is an initial release. Probably needs some API throttling and code could use some refactoring.

Wow this downloads 100 images for every character your type, I typed New York and it downloaded over 500 images.

And if you click onto an image to enlarge it, it downloads it again, every single time

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