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Comment by dotdi | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I wanted to buy stock images, I was shocked how expensive they were. I usually didn't intend to use them straight up commercially, but I felt like I should pay for somebodies work to produce these images. The prices were too steep though.

Unsplash was a God-sent. High quality images with only attribution requirements, which I was happy to give anyways. But Unsplash was bought by Shutterstock and became "kinda free" with the good stuff being paywalled. And now Shutterstock merges with Getty, two of the biggest players in the space.

Frankly, I am quite convinced this is bad for end-users. The space is already enshittified by all the AI junk. So I fully expect quality to go down and prices to go up after this merger.

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> Whenever I wanted to buy stock images, I was shocked how expensive they were.

It's funny, because authors of those images (at least on Shutterstock) get basically nothing (like ten cents for photo, iirc).

So how do we fix it? Better search/aggregator engine and unified payment scheme, but photographers get the money directly and simply pay 1 cent per purchase that came via the aggregator, rather than having to sign away their rights and getting pennies from a centralized platform?

Wondering if photographers can't already do this with regular search engine's image search, which (speaking for myself) is what I use when looking for usable images anyway. It often lands me on something like shutterstock but it's almost always too expensive, annoying to pay, or badly licensed. If they support common payment methods from around the world, anyone can buy unwatermarked versions for a dollar and the photographer gets 100%. I guess the downside is having to have a website of your own? Many photographers already have this anyway though

It's crazy after all this time we still don't have low friction small transaction capability on the western world's web. When I was in China way back in 2014 it seemed like they had an ability to this person to person from your phone, so why can't we get it for the web?

Maybe there's enough out of work developers someone can go after this seemingly low value but wished for since forever payment space.

I don't mind transferring euros to a bank account, it's more about american systems doing fraud detection and deciding I can't pay with a german address and a dutch bank account (stripe illegally (https://www.acceptmyiban.org) rejects that for example, can't pay for DeepL...; or paying for food with a german credit card and Dutch IP because my mobile data routes through NL, also gets rejected), german credit scoring being mandatory to force a "pay later" scheme on you when you just want to pay up front (involves either phishing you or validating your phone number), paypal simply having a broken UI that goes "something went wrong", etc.

Everyone with a bank account can transfer money online, merchants just need to accept it and not try to use dumb schemes that charge extra fees on top of the bank fees to "support more payment methods", that's my problem...

That’s why we’ve built Catch+Release, to make sure that creators are equitably compensated when licensing their content: https://www.catchandrelease.com

The page mentions UGC in prominent places without explaining it, alongside vague claims like "You may now license the internet" and "Harness the power of authentic content". Am I not the target audience, are these things that visitors are simply supposed to understand?

Edit: doing a search, is this like YouTube results? I thought Getty images and Shutterstock were for photos you can put in an article, presentation, website, game, etc. There's also no license mentioned for any of the results that I see. I really have no clue what this website or its videos are about, even with the context of this thread

Fair point. Most of our users are marketers and producers who are familiar with these terms, but we could make it clearer to those who are not in the know. Thanks!

Stock images only have okay pricing (per image) if you use some sort of decently sized subscription. Anyone that only needs a few images are unfortunately screwed.

Pexels is still very free, and seems to be high quality.

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