Where to get 100's of photos of people (face shots preferred) for free?

September 23, 2006 9:41 PM

These photos will populate my local database with photos of people for a dating site (this is just for dev purposes, a work in progress). I thought I'd write something to scrape them off hotornot.com or something similar, but perhaps there's an easier route (for free)?
posted by masymas to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

If it's for dev purposes, then use ImageMagick or something to create a bunch of sequentially-numbered images (or images containing a unique first name, or whatever) of appropriate sizes. That way when your dev data inadvertently leaks, a whole bunch of strangers don't get angry all of a sudden.

Test data needs to scream "test data". Avoid the risk of test data being mistaken for production data when possible.
posted by mendel at 10:00 PM on September 23, 2006

Get the daters to post their own photos. Otherwise, you're looking at a torrent (pun intended) of DMCA takedown letters, as you violate 100s of copyrights.
posted by orthogonality at 10:01 PM on September 23, 2006

The OP did say it's a local db... what we're saying is that you could use anything but only if the db is solely under your control and you're POSITIVE these images aren't still in use once the db goes online in any form (even a supposedly private or passworded one). I can definitely understand why real pics (all different) would be useful when perfecting & eyeballing this kind of design.

I think, though, that if you want an extra level of safety, scraping real pics from any existing site is bad and buying a CD of pics you're free to use is good. (I know there are plenty of companies that sell cheap CDs full of softcore pics that you can use to put together porn sites wihtout paying any licensing fees -- if you need both female & male pics you could buy one CD from a straight site & one from a gay site).
posted by allterrainbrain at 12:19 AM on September 24, 2006

ONe from a straight site, and one from a gay site. "Come, meet beautiful women and strangely well-tanned and groomed men!"

Whatever you do, add an extra field in the database table for these pictures that is called "test-image." Set to "true" for all of these images.

And, since they're probably JPGs, use some utility to add some bit to the EXIF header and put "test-image" in there, too. When you get ready to put this bad boy up on the Internets (assuming you've got the tubes for it), just siphon out all of the test images.
posted by adipocere at 5:06 AM on September 24, 2006

You can probably get all the free stock model images you'd like from deviantArt.
posted by unixrat at 5:47 AM on September 24, 2006

I would check Flickr for appropriately cc-licensed self-portraits. There's also free stock photo sites, although I don't know how much they have in the way of portraits:

http://sxc.hu/
http://www.morguefile.com/
http://www.pixelperfectdigital.com/
http://www.openphoto.net/
http://www.imageafter.com/
posted by O9scar at 11:21 AM on September 24, 2006 [1 favorite]