Show HN: Free hi-resolution photos for your website. 10 new photos every 10 days
unsplash.com
unsplash.com
Jesus Christ! What? Your poor egos are hurt because you didn't change the world before age 25 and now have to attack everyone's pet project for not being the next flickr?
So what did you guys make? Post links please.
Honestly. Nearly every crappy comment I see, while lower on the page, is still black. They're sending a signal that such behavior is acceptable. Kill them off ASAP.
Original title: "Hated expensive, crappy stock photos so I made this."
Current title: "Free hi-resolution photos for your website. 10 new photos every 10 days"
A lot of these comments are really negative and might be confusing to people who didn't know the original title. And frankly, when you have a title like that to start, it warrants some of the criticism.
If you just take this site for what it is, and what the new title says, then it's awesome and no one should really have a problem with someone spending their time taking great quality photos and releasing them for free.
It's not a bad idea. It certainly can lend a more dramatic look to a low-budget brochureware site, although were these to become popular, they'd quickly become recognizable.
Still - It is too general in both case and i can't seem to understand the use case.
Even with more pictures it's unlikely you'll beat a Creative Commons search on Flickr:
I think this is a great idea. Why go through the hassle of selling your photos and worrying about people stealing them when you can make money on ad revenue instead?
Well, for a lot of reasons... if photography is what you're good at and what you enjoy, the make-money-on-ads model makes no sense unless you're also very good at generating traffic.
It also at least partially removes your income from the quality and quantity of your output. Of course the latter will be one important factor in building and maintaining traffic, but the reality of your business then becomes driving traffic, with photography as an ancillary requirement.
Plus you're now dependent not only on your ability to take good pictures and drive large amounts of traffic, you're also at the mercy of changing revenue. Great, you're making a living wage... but now suddenly your ad service isn't paying as much as it used to, so the same volume of traffic brings you less money. Oops.
There are tradeoffs, but I would not say this is a viable alternative at all unless you're also doing other things and driving traffic is as much your primary skill as photography.
If you need professional quality stuff, you should be paying for it from one of the many stock agencies around. The agencies have lots of rules and safeguards that are designed to save you the headache of worrying about whether model releases were signed, etc.
Also, photographers with GOOD images don't sell them for $0.05 on Fotolia, Dreamstime, etc... Getty Images sucks because of it's restrictions and $3,000 / price tag and prehistoric policies. If you check the stock photo site's payout rates you'll realize why they have so many generic images and so little amazing photography. The good photographers keep their stuff off those stock sites.
For example, here is an image from the link in the parent
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamestemple/312325101/sizes/o/
and here is the license
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
which says: "Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). "
Ok, someone tell me what manner is specified by the author.
Anyone who's built side projects that could use a little pizzazz would be well served by this. It's really useful to the community.
Yet another reasons people pay for hi-resolution high-quality photographs, or take their own. Photographs cost money because they provide value, and some random photos taken by a non-professional don't always cut it. Great of you to give it a shot and put it out there though.
For legal reasons it's critical to fully explain the license on the photos available for download, and the terms for anybody submitting the photos. Unfortunately it's really not enough to just say: "Free hi-resolution photos for your website."
Unfortunately we live in a legal environment where the author stating "free for commercial and personal use" is not a licence strong enough to hold up under law.
(Use the CC stuff if you can.)
https://github.com/mrluc/node-dbp-irctweet/blob/master/LICEN...
Sorry to go off-topic, but MVPs are meant to be extreme! That's the whole point. Maybe OP has no idea about licenses or the necessity of them. Had they not posted this, all these lovely comments on the matter would have never been written!
I don't know why. But I laughed so hard on this.
I don't see it under search tools...
You get there by clicking the gear icon on the right side of the image search results page; 'Advanced search' is under that. Yay for Google making one more tool more difficult interact with.
There's a reason why advertisers will edit out branding of products that they happen to use in their ads. The most prominent examples I can think of are tire companies. They use recognizable luxury and sports cars to show off their tires, but, if you look closely, they've edited out the logos and nameplates of those cars. Presumably this is to legally shield themselves from those car manufacturers accusing the tire company of misusing their trademarks, or implying an endorsement where none exists. In this case, it might be wise to edit out the Macbook Air and Apple branding, so that it doesn't look like you're being endorsed or supported by Apple.
I wouldn't assume that. It could also be simply because they don't want to give publicity to another brand. For example it's hard to believe that if Coach decided to put an ad with an Apple Macbook in it they would have an issue with that. [1]
In any case here are the Apple guidelines:
http://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/guidelinesf...
I see nothing on this page which prohibits someone from using an Apple product in a photograph and it's almost impossible to believe that Apple could claim trademark (or even if they could would expend energy to stamp this out) over someone taking a photo of their laptop. In other words a picture of someone sitting in a coffee shop using a Macbook, iphone whatever.
[1] That said Coach is a large company and they would almost certainly be ritually correct in their approach. Done on a smaller scale the amount of care does not have to be the same.
"However, a French court ruled, in June 1990, that a special lighting display on the tower in 1989, for the tower's 100th anniversary, was an "original visual creation" protected by copyright. The Court of Cassation, France's judicial court of last resort, upheld the ruling in March 1992.[54] The Société d'exploitation de la tour Eiffel (SETE) now considers any illumination of the tower to be under copyright.[55] As a result, it is no longer legal to publish contemporary photographs of the tower at night without permission in France and some other countries."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower#Image_copyright_c...
This info pertains to NYC, I believe it to be correct:
http://everydayaperture.com/law/
More info:
http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/tutorials/photography_l...
That said, there are plenty of examples in the wild, even in app store screenshots, of violations of this policy. So Apple's enforcement doesn't seem to be particularly strict.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/appstore/AppStoreMarketingGuidel...
I would recommend displaying the license in which these high resolution photos can be used, because "free" isn't a license.
Some people believe they become better humans for using Apple products. By showing it to the world they think that other people will agree.
It's exactly like the cross.
It's funny that this seems to be a big deal.
The answer's simple -- many people just photograph the stuff they happen to own.
If you don't want to pay the big bucks and don't use a lot of media, hire a photographer. In any large city a LF photographer post on craiglists will net you more emails then you know what to do with. If you only need a handful of shots just use one of the many "Fiver" type sites.
I don't know why this post is upvoted so high, unless your website sells macbooks, watches, or glasses of water, the premise is ridiculous.
These cannot be used in commercial print for discerning customers.
I've found great results on Flickr with a Creative Commons search, and buying stock photos for commercial work is a tiny part of a print piece budget.
Yeah, I'm not sure that's his target market. Most of the people who would use his images probably don't even know what CA is or how to spot it -- they just care about "free".
I imagine that more serious image hunters would stick with the big stock agencies.
Some of the other feedback is spot on, but I, for one, thank you for your intentions. Being thankful and polite is so underrated.
EDIT: Rather, making explicit that they are royalty-free images for both non-commercial and commercial use.
At the same time, you should look into your technique if you'd like these to be usable for commercial print work.
These likely cannot be used in print work as is; the photo quality is borderline. They likely wouldn't be chosen by art directors to use large (eg., background images) or on today's retina screens, for the same reason. If someone is reviewing the work, too many clients' eyes will jump to the problems.
You may want to consider a better lens that doesn't exhibit the strong purple color fringing. You also need to reduce (or change methods of) the post processing that's causing severe fringing between the various subjects in the pictures, ringing on the out of focus elements, etc. These look and feel a lot like high end camera phone pics run through too much filter.
In considering composition, watch out for elements like the errant finger on the left hand writing. Any element that's too unusual draws excess attention, detracting from stock photo value, unless of course that element is the featured element.
Check out the quality standards guidelines at iStockPhotos:
http://www.istockphoto.com/help/sell-stock/training-manuals/...
For example, they would have likely rejected these for chromatic aberration and maybe for over filtering:
http://www.istockphoto.com/help/sell-stock/training-manuals/...
http://www.istockphoto.com/help/sell-stock/training-manuals/...
Finally, as noted in other comments, generally company logos are not acceptable in stock photography:
http://www.istockphoto.com/help/sell-stock/training-manuals/...
I have a full studio with Profoto strobes. If you need some more contributors, let me know.
Some other thoughts:
- I think you'll grow out of Tumblr and Dropbox real quick (I'm already seeing Dropbox errors)
- Give people an option to "buy out" an image from the set. For, say, $100 someone can license exclusively an image and it's no longer available.
- Include some Photoshop files that place a screen shot on the image and apply the proper perspective/warping. People can then just drop in their screen shots.
Good MVP.
EDIT: Here's a quick-and-dirty example of a PSD with a "placed" screenshot that is adjusted properly to fit the screen:
Not even close to a full stock photo replacement.
This is someone winning a bet that they could get anything to the top of hacker news somehow, right?
Hacking is sooooooo cool and clean!
http://placeit.breezi.com/ is a very similar service with CC images.
edit: I see a lot of you took issue with the original title:
> "Hated expensive, crappy stock photos so I made this"
Granted, it wasn't a great title but I kind of get where he's coming from - I used to spend hours trawling through istockphoto and shutterstock for decent photographs and a lot of it matched that description.
Then again, the OP did release it right at the start, before it'll be useful to anyone, so I'm surprised it's hit the #1 spot.
Even if you do keep this pace, you'll have a grand total of 365 pictures after a year, covering something like 36 topics. Not exactly ground-breaking. It would be great if you could crowd-source and curate the best pictures.
The HN community has really deteriorated in the last year or two.
Which, btw, would be awesome.
Again, really great work, and thank you again.
Just a thought: You should have a "tip jar" so people can show their appreciation where it counts.
some1 snaps a few pics of his macbook air!
and boom is one top of the HN front page
Also, he had an idea and executed it and released it, so he gets points for that as well.
When you pay for a stock image, as an aside, a part of the value of paying is economic scarcity: That the images that you choose aren't blanketing every Wordpress site, etc.
Lets say I write an article negatively portraying the electronics manufacturing industry and use these images along with the article. I'm pretty sure Apple wouldn't like it if they found out...
Despite the reactionary comments in this thread, we're not in a corporatist dystopia where it's against the law to publish a photograph of a ubiquitous consumer device.
Libel and slander laws are more directed at individuals... large corporate companies are free game in my opinion.
It's important to know and understand the reasons behind advice like that. It totally depends on the circumstances, who is doing it and a host of other factors. Best practice? Get a government job with a pension and you won't have to worry about anything. Work for a corporation where they have departments that tell you what you can and should do and worry about all sorts of minutia.
I've used Apple logos in the past frequently as well as other things similar. Large companies don't expend energy and legal time doing anything nasty to small companies without a compelling reason (of course you could show me outliers obviously but you can't make money in business worrying about those outliers). Worse case scenario is normally a nasty letter asking you to stop, if that. The chance of an actual legal claim and money damages (once again in most cases) is minute. You might have to pay a lawyer to write something in reply. So what?
(And yes I've gone up against the NCAA and AMX with nasty letters and made them go away so I've pushed the envelope at least that far..I've also gotten approval in advance from the IRS as well for a project using their logo.)
If you are talking about Apple's marketing partners' rules for using photography, then those do not apply to the rest of the world.
I'm no fan of stock photos but I have to say that the few images look pretty much like stock photos. Which is what I don't like about them. The fact that you don't have to pay is really not the issue it's that particular look (with the blur etc.) that bothers me.
Isn't this a bit much? There's hardly any text on the site at all, much less enough to 'denigrate an entire industry'.
This is just a web page with 10 photos on it with a cc license. Don't know where you're getting the rest of that.
Apparently you're new here.
Huh, where did he denigrate an entire industry?
Lots of hate in this thread, which I don't get. Granted, you can find a lot of free stock photos on the internet, but I find the idea of curated list of photos targeted for product landing pages valuable. This was clearly an MVP and for some reason HN audience found it valuable and voted it to the front page, but I don't see how it deserves all the negativity that is shown in many comments.
and for some reason HN audience found it valuable and voted it to the front page
This a recurring retort. It's nonsense. A very small percentage of HNers can get something to the top of the front page (especially if it uses a title that panders to a bias, given that many people never actually click on the link). That they do in no world inoculates the target against any criticism.
Your process resulted in absolutely horrible posterization, can be clearly seen on this one (display of the laptop):
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/18793141/macbook-air-all...
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