Shortly after doing so we ended up in receivership, so a lot of people featured no longer had jobs! As a result I believe we ended up removing a lot of the pictures, which caused some maintenance-pain.

A better example might be “hire your own models” rather than “use stock photos”, but that gets expensive.

Clearly, both of these competitors had purchased the same stock galleries. It’s like a woman showing up at a party in a snazzy outfit, only to discover that someone else is wearing the same thing.

the people from xTuple and MegaRaid first tried separately to hire the MySQL employees we had professionally photographed, and when that didn’t work out, they teamed up in an attempt to buy our entire data center as well as our company photographer.

In short, we simply had to put a stop to it so we told them that it was ok to reuse our material. For their convenience, we made the photo available as stock-photo, much to their rejoicement.

(joking aside - we had a stab at using our own photos which didn’t work out for a number of reasons. Stock photos are a convenience feature, much like a takeaway dinner. Maybe not the best, but in many cases sufficient.

I’m hardly objective of course, but I think we did a pretty nice pick. I reviewed many, many stock photos, and it is unbelievable how many of them are truly crap. you will find many, many pictures that are clearly photoshopped: often a “server room” is photo of some black box duplicated ad-infinitum. You will also find a posed model duplicated to different backgrounds.

We settled for this photo because the image conveys a sense of openness - the woman is looking straight in the camera - and of being in control - all people are at ease and look happy. The people all look very real by my standards - very much in contrast to the suit and tie party peering at the laptop in your first sample photo.
Also, there is no way to really judge it, but the room looks real too, at least in comparison to the piles and piles of stockfotos I reviewed.)

You’re sample image is dead on… and in line with my thoughts exactly. There comes a point when stock photography becomes staged photography - and everyone knows it.

On the other hand, we ran a survey of some web site mock-ups to some prospectives in our industry and had feedback overwhelmingly in favor of the perfect faces and professionally photographed people in the images. One memorable quote in response to the mockup WITHOUT professional shots & models was, “Seriously, get some models.”

But our target audience is pre-college teenagers, so designers should also consider elements like that when they select their photos.

Use stock photography with caution I say… and some advice I would offer - never use the ‘Top result’ off a stock photo search. ;-)

I’m looking forward to more posts on Maatkit and your work with MySQL - congrats on the new job!