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Comment by nsgi | Hacker News Reader

Not sure I agree about stock photos. Not all stock photos are headset hotties and bespoke photography is expensive. Even large organisations use stock photos, so I think it makes sense for a small company, especially if it isn't a core competency.

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My philosophy is that stock photos are bad when you could be using that space to visually give visitors information about your product/site/organization/whatever.

I work on software for apartment communities, and a huge offender I see is stock photos of smiling people being used on property websites. Do you want to see fake people on an apartment website? No, you want to see photos of the actual property.

You're right. There are some good alternatives to the typical stock photographs though.

http://deathtothestockphoto.com/ is awesome and very affordable.

The blog post uses a stock photo! From Unsplash!

You’re right, good catch! The reason is we don’t consider Unsplash to be a conventional stock photo repo, since the style and quality of photography digresses so much from the usual stock photo sites. We probably should have pointed out what we meant by stock photo- the article is targetting sites such as Shutterstock, iStock, Dreamstime, and the like. We love Unsplash, it has a very personal twist on similar subjects, making the photos available there that much more relatable and honest.

A lot of the stuff on iStock is good. Here's a window one:

http://www.istockphoto.com/photo/white-window-frame-and-wint...

Not sure I see the difference between that and Unsplash.

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