It's interesting to watch how what was considered good taste a short time ago is gradually becoming tired, cliché, phoney -- and in 10 years will look as outdated as 2003's web designs look now.
The software industry and startup scene is enormously fashion-driven. A lot of people like to pretend it's the opposite though: a group of ideal meritocracies building highly needed products based on rational data-driven decisions...
Staying fashionable for a given context is a fantastic means of signaling that you're well connected. Even more so if you kick off a new trend.
Fashion based signals then inevitable degrade as they become more mainstream and are replaced by whatever hot new thing that's different enough to avoid confusion with other trends.
Even an ideal meritocracy requires abstractions for efficient communication.
My quick-n-dirty benchmark for measuring the exhaustiveness of a stock photo website is how many photos I can find of man laughing alone with fruit salad. One of the staples of corporate promotional photography.
In this case, 0. Without looking too hard, Getty has 39. Of course, the quality of the search engine and tag database also plays into these results.
Given how often the same images gets reused, given that I regularly recognise many of the popular Unsplash images all over the place these days, clearly we need a lot more variety.
How does their business model work? Are they a not-for-profit or non-profit? Do they really get enough money from shutterstock click-throughs and donations to fund the site and image curation process?
> Only Creative Commons images from our community of photographers and sources like Unsplash, Gratisography, Little Visuals and many more are added to our photo database. We constantly try to deliver as many high quality free stock photos as possible to the creatives who use our website.
"The only restriction is that identifiable people may not appear in a bad light or in a way that they may find offensive, unless they give their consent."
ShutterStock is similarly vague, although they give some examples of offensive use.
From the ShutterStock license:
[YOU MAY NOT] Portray any person depicted in Visual Content (a "Model") in a way that a reasonable person would find offensive, including but not limited to depicting a Model: a) in connection with pornography, "adult videos", adult entertainment venues, escort services, dating services, or the like; b) in connection with the advertisement or promotion of tobacco products; c) in a political context, such as the promotion, advertisement or endorsement of any party, candidate, or elected official, or in connection with any political policy or viewpoint; d) as suffering from, or medicating for, a physical or mental ailment; or e) engaging in immoral or criminal activities.
...so if the model happens to be Muslim and someone uses it in a website which sells pork meat, there is a potential case here? (I chose the example because I'm coming from a country in which this kind of stuff usually happened to be a problem - nothing meant against any religion or group).
I think he means Pexels search sucks, not yours. Although he/she is not clear.
Your site does not look like it was made by a beginner. Seriously, is this what beginners can do?
I just did a side by side comparison searching for "ashtray", and your Librestock search actually finds ashtray photos from Pexels that not even Pexels search returns. So I'm quite confident that Pexels search sucks and yours does not suck.
The reason I can find stuff from pexels that they cant find is actually because I have duplicate image detection that sources the tags from multiple sources. So a different source must have tagged it as ashtray!
I've been building websites for a year. I still consider myself very much a beginner. (I worked in design before that). thanks for the compliment!
(1) mountainscapes
(2) cityscapes
(3) fields
(4) pretty girls standing in fields, and
(5) coffeshop patrons typing away on powered-off MacBooks
... does the world really need?
Especially when they all come with washed-out Instagram filters pre-applied.