Stock & Visual Asset Sourcing

Decides whether a specific image use is legally permitted, what the license obligates, and whether a model or property release is required - covering CC0 and Creative Commons variants, Unsplash/Pexels/Pixabay terms, royalty-free vs rights-managed, standard vs extended tiers, editorial-use-only, and AI-image caveats - and delivers a per-image license record. Use when someone asks "is this free for commercial use", "do I need to credit the photographer", "can I put this on merchandise", "what is royalty-free vs rights-managed", "is editorial-use-only a problem", or "do I need a model release", or is about to publish, advertise, or sell anything containing a stock image. Do NOT use to find or search for a photo - use stock-photo-finder instead; do NOT use to fetch images via an API with attribution rules - use stock-photo-api instead.

Integrates the Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay APIs in code - auth, search endpoints, rate limits, attribution, hotlinking versus caching rules, and the compliance obligations that get apps deactivated when skipped. Use when someone says "integrate the Unsplash API", "pull images from Pexels in my app", "build an image picker on a stock photo API", "how do I trigger the Unsplash download endpoint", or is wiring stock imagery into a CMS, blog pipeline, or placeholder service. Do NOT use to choose a source by hand or write a search brief - use stock-photo-finder instead; do NOT use to decide whether a license permits a use or a release is needed - use image-license-rights instead; do NOT use to art-direct results - use visual-asset-curation instead.

Art-direct a set of stock images so they look intentional and on-brand instead of like stock, and choose and sequence the final picks. Use when you have candidate images and need to decide which ones, in what order, and why a set "looks cheap" or "like stock", or when someone says "these don't feel cohesive", "make this look less like stock photos", "pick the best images for this page", or "why does this look generic". It covers spotting the stock-cliche tells, defining a visual system (palette, light, tone, angle), curating a set to consistency, choosing compositions that hold text overlays, and a color-grade pass to unify a mismatched set. Do NOT use to find or search for images -> use stock-photo-finder; do NOT use to check licensing or releases -> use image-license-rights; do NOT use to fetch images via an API -> use stock-photo-api.