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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

Something I've noticed in both website builders and theme buying is that it is very hard to separate the incredible stock photography from the overall style of the site.

The common experience seems to be picking what you think is the "perfect" theme only to find that it's really dependent upon having thousands of dollars of high-end photos taken.

It seems like an unsolved problem.

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I used to work on Squarespace's templates team, and this is a very real problem we talked about with some frequency.

There's a few solutions, one of which is designing more around text, but in many instances people still want the media-heavy look. For those cases, the image tool tied in with Unsplash, which made getting high quality stock images pretty easy.

I like Unsplash, but I don't understand their business model. What makes it sustainable?

I don't have much visibility into that but the Squarespace ad on their homepage is absolutely a clue :)

Unsplash is just an image hosting place. The photos are contributed by users. Unfortunately, they no longer have a CC0 license.

What about pixabay?

I wonder how difficult it would be to have GAN-generated "stock photos" to match a particular style.

My understanding is that resolution is still an issue.

You can use free stock sites like Unsplash, Pexels, etc. Are you referring to more specific stock photo shots?

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