An old mate of mine who's fleet of removal vehicles were perfectly functional, if not a little tired, bought a new truck, had it sign written and photographed from several angles so that he could superimpose the new company vehicles (plural) parked up outside their old barn of a business unit. He then went on to superimpose new signage over a bought in photo of their supposedly new but non existent, extended premises. This old family company now gave the appearance of having a much bigger fleet and more secure, modern storage facilities.
Scroll forward to today, whilst searching the website for a company I purchased from several months ago, I see that nearly all of the sales teams photographs have been changed for stock images. Mary is now an attractive redhead, Lorenzo, who must be 50 is now a young Italian stallion and 2 others now meet ethnic stereotypes.
In the scheme of things, no one's going to get hurt or die from the above deception, but is it good and legal practice?
Coming at it from a brand and web perspective;
We sometimes have clients who need a new website, but don't necessarily have the photography or content budget. In an ideal scenario, we also factor a photoshoot. I often tell clients ' the most stunning website possible would be ruined if you put bad images on it'.
So the challenge, how do you design someone a stunning new website, but avoid ruining it when it comes to populating it with content if the clients doesn't have good images. We have a process that we follow which I'll briefly outline below.
For any project, be it building a large e-commerce website, or running a small social media campaign, we always produce a
brand guideline doc. This is sometimes just an internal document for our team, but one which is crucial in determining how the clients brand will be represented online.... text and images falls within the scope of this document.
If a client doesn't have great images, we will make decisions on what type of images we want to use in an ideal world. If for example, the client is a building company with a few example photos on their phones, we will look through these and start to build a library of ones that might be usable.
Inevitablyy we will find a mix between usable, definitely not usable, and possibly usable. This is really where a brand guideline comes into play. It might be acceptable for example to use an image containing a good subject, which is badly taken, in the right context (on social for example).
When it comes to websites, we will make a call on the website images based on the quality of images available to us. If we know that the client has an overall poor selection of images, we won't design a site that has huge hero images at the top of most pages.
The other thing we often do, which I am a great advocate of is to use stock images. There are some great resources out there such as open-commons, canva's library, pixabay, as well as more premium offerings such as Shutter Stock.
I'd rarely advise a client to use entirely stock images, but in the right context, they can work. We recently completed a website for a dog sitting service provider. Despite sitting for hundreds of dogs, we couldn't find one image which was really of the quality we would want to use. In this scenario we built a library of stock dog and puppy photos to use on the site.... yes they are not our client's customer's dogs, but our call is that we don't see that as deceptive or misleading.
Where we do draw the line is when it comes to product images. If someone is selling a specific product, then it should be their responsibility to obtain or budget for usable images of that product.
The same can be said of service-based sectors.If we were building a website for a construction company, I'd consider it very misleading if the client asked us to use a photograph of a stunning 5-bed detached house, which was stock. I wouldn't however have any issue using a close-up image of a builder using a hammer and nails.
In terms of the op's example of changing staff images to be stock images of people who don't work for the company. I don't know if it is illegal, but personally, I think that is immoral and misleading. I'd probably not be very happy if I worked there either.
I think in most cases a common-sense approach to how real and stock images are used should suffice, but of course, that does have to be underpinned by some moral standards and pride in your own product or service.
