On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 8:05 AM, Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net wrote:
I deal with this regularly in a professional capacity, this is what stock photography firms are built on, and I can assure you that there is no adequate freely licensed stock photography resource in the world. Commons is the best there is, and it is barely usable, and then only sporadically. Maybe some people imagine we have too many pictures of people's cats and dogs, since those are popular subjects, but I'll say we don't have nearly enough even of that - and in particular we don't have enough variety. Suppose I wanted a picture of a dog and a cat together, a fairly mundane subject, for which I did at least find a category with 27 files at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Cats_and_dogs. I suppose that's a start, but at a glance there's no way that provides enough options for what I might want, especially if I was particular about how they're posed or what breed they are.
I think this comes back to something I already talked about when Commons only just started - we don't need the umptieth picture of a dog, but we do want more pictures of specific dog breeds (although as things are now, we're pretty much over-stuffed with the more popular dog breeds too), of dogs doing specific things, of dogs in specific situations etcetera. However, this takes more than just getting more pictures. It's also important that they are described well (George W. Bush talking is "just another Bush picture", but if you know where he is speaking at what occasion it becomes much more), and that they are findable.