In yesterday’s blog post on Pexels.com, Monica talks about The Quest For Diversity In Stock Media. We all know: seeing is believing. And that applies of course also for stock images. In 2017 alone, Pexels saw over 4 Million searches for “love” and “business” and “girl”. What an opportunity to define, what these terms stand for!
Though we continue our quest to widen our photo library and offer more balanced results celebrating various ethnic, cultural, and gender groups, in a perfect world, we’d already have tons of images of gay couples with children, transgendered people at work, and hispanic women programming… but we’re not there yet.
For way too long the stock media industry has been following the same pattern: popular search results were listed on top, followed by the not so popular search results. This is great, if you want to use the same pictures, as everybody else – but following this pattern does also have a built-in self-fulfilling promise: the popular pictures will always be the popular pictures.
In yesterday’s blog post Monika is also listing three steps Pexels took towards a more diverse stock image landscape:
When you search for “women” or “woman” your results will be ones the team and I have personally combed through. That means less seductive ladies …
We’ve partnered with nappy to feature their library of “beautiful, high-res photos of black and brown people.”
We’re launching the Everyday People photo campaign in the month of April …
This is brilliant. We’re not quite there yet – but at least Pexels seems to be on the way. Please feel free to read the full blog post “The Quest For Diversity In Stock Media” over at pexels.com.