Stock photos on websites: where they cost trust, where they're fine, how to make them fit
Stock photos on websites cost trust when they stand in for something the visitor expects to be real: the team, the premises, the work, the customers. They're fine for atmosphere, texture and generic subjects nobody will check, such as a coffee bean, a city skyline or a sheet of paper. The craft is in choosing ones that don't look staged and making them match.
Why stock photography has a reputation
Commercial stock libraries grew to serve advertising and print, where a generic image of “business meeting” or “happy family” was useful filler. The same pictures then spread across the web, and visitors learned to recognise them: perfect lighting, perfectly diverse groups laughing at salads, people in suits pointing at blank screens. When one of those appears on a small business's site, the visitor's first thought is that the business didn't show them anything real. Free libraries with more natural photography, such as Unsplash, improved the look but created their own familiar set of images.
Where stock hurts and where it's fine
| Subject | Stock? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Team, founders, staff | No | Visitors assume these are the real people; discovering otherwise damages trust in everything else |
| Premises, shop, clinic, venue | No | People want to know what they'll walk into |
| Products you sell | No | Customers expect the actual item, colour and finish |
| Portfolio or past work | Never | Presenting someone else's work as yours is misleading |
| Testimonials and customers | No | A stock face next to a quote makes the quote look invented |
| Atmosphere: landscape, city, weather | Usually fine | Generic subjects nobody expects to be specific |
| Textures and close-ups: paper, wood, coffee, fabric | Fine | Decorative, and hard to tell from your own |
| Concepts for articles | Fine, chosen carefully | Readers expect illustration rather than evidence |
Choosing stock that doesn't look like stock
- Avoid looking-at-camera smiles. Candid, mid-action images read as more real than posed ones.
- Prefer objects and places to people. A close-up of hands at work is more believable than a full staged scene.
- Skip the first page of results. The most popular images are the ones visitors have already seen elsewhere.
- Match the local reality. Plugs, street signs, cars, weather and seasons should fit where the business is.
- Check the licence. Commercial use, editorial-only restrictions, and model or property releases all matter for a business site. Free libraries have their own terms; Unsplash's licence, for example, allows commercial use without attribution but has restrictions, such as on selling unaltered copies.
Making a mixed set look consistent
- Pick a light. Warm daylight, cool overcast, or dark and moody. Reject images that don't share it.
- Pick a palette. Images whose colours sit near the site's palette look chosen; one bright outlier looks pasted in.
- Crop to a few ratios. Use the same two or three aspect ratios across the site; see image aspect ratios for websites.
- Apply one light treatment, if any. A gentle shared colour grade or a slight desaturation can pull a mixed set together. Heavy filters date quickly.
- Keep the camera distance consistent within a section: all close-ups, or all wide shots, not one of each.
Better still, mix: your own photos for anything specific, a small number of well-chosen stock images for atmosphere. Your own photos don't need a professional photographer to work; website photography direction covers how to brief or take them.
Accessibility
Every meaningful image needs a text alternative that says what it shows in this context (WCAG 2.2 success criterion 1.1.1), and purely decorative images should have an empty alt="" so screen readers skip them. Stock images are often decorative: a texture behind a heading doesn't need a description. Avoid text baked into photos, and check contrast wherever text sits on top. How to write alt text has examples.
Photos in Anticode
Anticode places the photos you add to a build: each upload is checked by its first bytes, not its file name, and stored under your account, and the model sees the photos so it can place them sensibly. Pages from the design engine can also use a curated library of photographs from Unsplash, each with written alt text, which is useful for atmosphere while you gather your own. Sentinel checks that every image on the page has a text alternative before it can be published. Its check counts an empty alt as missing, even though the design gate accepts one for a decorative image, so give every photo a short description.
Design-engine pages show your uploads and that curated library, and the code editor doesn't keep added markup, so you can't hotlink a photo from another library there. To use one, download it under its licence and upload it. App builds can't load outside images at all.
Questions people ask
Should I use stock photos on my business website?
For atmosphere and textures, yes. For your team, premises, products and work, use real photos, even simple ones taken on a phone in good light.
Can I use Unsplash photos on a business website?
Generally yes under the Unsplash licence, including commercially and without attribution, with some restrictions. Check the licence and avoid recognisable people implying endorsement.
Do stock photos hurt SEO?
Not directly. They can make pages less distinctive, and the same images appear on many sites, but trust and conversions are the bigger concern.