I’m so done with Unsplash images.
I really hate seeing the same images over and over again as well as these prestine pictures of minimalist desktops. I vow to only use photos I take for my blog from now on.
Thank you for listening to my TED talk.
@ChrisJWilson I think the increase in Ghosts popularity hasn’t helped. It’s built into that, so encourages a lot more use.
@gr36 @AndyNicolaides @chrisjwilson I’m a big fan of Unsplash, a Montreal-based company (my home town!). But here is a trick: I try to not pick a picture in the first few search results. It takes more time but it increase the chance of having a unique picture.
@ChrisJWilson I'm on this side with you, Chris. I'd rather not see a picture than something favoured by a bland corporate decision-making machine. If anything, it distracts me from some of the words since it often feels like something was just put in there for no reason other than to look acceptable.
@ChrisJWilson @numericcitizen @gr36 Unsplash is super handy for adding images to blog posts. The mistake everyone makes, though, is thinking that every blog post needs a gaint damn image. We've been conditioned to it. Blog themes practically insist on it, even though they are 99 times out of 100 irrelevant to the story. It's needless, bandwidth-hogging eye candy that forces me to scroll way down there just to read a 200-word blog post.. So there! :).
@jack @ChrisJWilson @numericcitizen @gr36 ok, I admit of being guilty of such practice. That being said, here is the thing: I do try to select a picture somehow related to the post content AND I created a automator task to reduce the size of the file by two third in general. So there! :-).
@numericcitizen And I don't blame you for doing it. I do it, too, at times. These days I worry that you can't be considered a "serious" blogger without one. I mean, what's up with that boring, naked post, anyway :). It's one of those things I wish were different, but won't be. In my younger days I might get worked up about it, but now I just chill. :)
@ChrisJWilson I agree. I think you should own basically everything you publish on your site. With the exception of plain text quotes.
@numericcitizen Hey, another Montrealer! 👋
I think the right image can add impact to a post, but I agree that you have to put effort into it — otherwise it just looks like Yet Another Post On Popular Blogging Platform Of The Month™️.
@ChrisJWilson +1 with you and @jack on this. It’s not the fault of Unsplash but I’ve become blind to blog images that are obviously stock. I work at a university and the communications department actually went so far as to create their own stock photo pool to keep our sites from looking like growth-hack spammers.
@gr36 I can definitely understand that reasoning and I would never say no one should use it. In fact, that's probably the reason I used it in the past.
@simonwoods Harsh...probably fair...also my company loves Unsplash which almost certainly proves your point :D
@AlanGMarz Now that's a nice twist, and unsplash is great for find graphic elements to use. Did you hear about the UK goverment law suit for using an Unsplash image.
@mdrockwell How do you feel about sharing videos/graphics like Kottke? I supose the addition would be to cite your sources. I do like the idea of your site being your stuff... all of it! I think that was one of the original appeals of blogging to me, it's not just writing but creating images and whatever. A digital playground.
@gregmoore Care to share any examples? It's certainly tough to make good stock stuff and I remember unsplash (and death to stock photography emerging as alternative to bad standard stock images...ironic that now Unsplash "feels" the same to me.)
@ChrisJWilson I’ll put it this way, in the past 12 or so years, I have never embedded a video on my weblog that I didn’t create. And I haven’t added an image that I didn’t create in about 10 years.
@gr36 I aim to have strong personal opinions that I'm not going to force on anyone, and understand that people may have a different perspective.
@ChrisJWilson This is the university site I'm refering to. Just my opinion: Stock photography is not inherently bad. The problem is the whole SEO and blog theme industry telling bloggers that their actual content isn’t good enough to attract and keep readers. Entire businesses have been built, and continue to run, on solutions to false problems they created and a lot of it is untrue and unhealthy for the blogging community.
@mdrockwell as an amateur photographer myself, I'd love to be able to use my own images to go with my posts but they don't relate to them. I'm using my images in my newsletter, though, you can see here: numericcitizen.substack.com
@AlanGMarz here’s the tweet I saw last year. unsplash doesn’t collect or provide model releases soooo there are some litigation risks.
@jack Agreed. There is something quite elegant to blog posts with no images. Sort of takes me back to golden era of something ; )
@ChrisJWilson @ChrisJWilson I’ve stopped using Unsplash, though I think there are some distinctly individual images there if you dig deep enough, as @numericcitizen says. I don’t take a lot of photographs, so if I were to use my own photos exclusively, that would be a definite obstacle to posting regularly! I’ve been using illustrations and commercial art from MixKit. There isn’t a huge range there yet but some of the artwork is ideal for blog posts (until it starts to get overused, as Unsplash has).
@ChrisJWilson Yeah. I often see it as part of a bunch of non-reasons to at some point say "I want to blog but can't find the flow" or however the excuse is put into written form. The only problem is that everything other than the words simply does not matter; adopting that mentality is how you write regularly, no matter whether you put it on a blog or anywhere else.
Of course if somebody uses image as a part of their process, then sure, I get that. I'm just not confident you could do that for long with some of the images I see without feeling concerned that your process includes something so unoriginal.
@AlanGMarz the Creative Commons part is all valid and the person who took the photo has waved copyright, but it doesn’t mean you have the right to use the image of a person in. Probably, it’s fine, the person may have consented or be unaware that they could sue. They also probably wouldn’t notice most sites but if I took a photo of a random person and used it, they could in theory sue. Similar issues can apply to locations as well. I had heard about the potential risk from Zak Aeris and the UK gov case is the first and only example I know of it actually occurring.