from Hacker News

LibreStock – do-whatever-you-want stock photos

by davegri on 10/7/15, 6:09 PM with 38 comments

  • by anigbrowl on 10/7/15, 8:09 PM

    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.

  • by omm on 10/7/15, 8:11 PM

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

  • by yaps8 on 10/7/15, 7:16 PM

    It is unfortunate that the suggested example triggers no result.

    "0 Results for silly face"

  • by 15charlimit on 10/7/15, 7:44 PM

    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?

  • by supersan on 10/7/15, 9:36 PM

    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?

  • by pmiller2 on 10/7/15, 7:46 PM

    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.

  • by bariumbitmap on 10/7/15, 9:40 PM

    Results for "bald" are somewhat puzzling.

    https://imgur.com/hrNitqk

  • by zecho on 10/7/15, 7:56 PM

  • by Retr0spectrum on 10/7/15, 7:56 PM

    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.

  • by oberstein on 10/7/15, 9:41 PM

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

  • by hamhamed on 10/7/15, 7:42 PM

    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?

  • by skrowl on 10/7/15, 7:47 PM

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

  • by yarrel on 10/7/15, 6:23 PM

    So that's gratisstock, then.