Generative image tools are now good enough to be tempting for anything that used to need a stock photo. Photofolio has chosen not to sell generated images, but we are not going to pretend they have no uses. Here is how we would weigh the decision for a real project.

Rights and risk

A photograph of real people and places with releases has clear, established rights. Generated imagery does not: copyright status is unsettled in the UK and elsewhere, training-data litigation is ongoing, and platform terms vary. For advertising, packaging and anything long-lived, the certainty of a licensed photograph is worth a lot.

Trust

Audiences have become good at spotting generated images, and research consistently shows they trust brands less when they notice. For sectors where trust is the product — health, finance, charities, public services, professional services — authentic photography is the safer bet.

Leopard, Panthera pardus, close-up of a male.Two male leopards, Panthera pardus, on a…A buffalo calf, Syncerus caffer, running through…At the Midway-Sunset oil fields outside Bakersfield,…

Where generation makes sense

Concept boards and mood exploration; illustrative imagery where nothing real exists to photograph; internal mock-ups; and abstract backgrounds where provenance is irrelevant. Many teams generate to brief and then license real photography for the finished piece.

Cost and consistency

A Photofolio image is £6 or less. That is competitive with the labour of prompting, reviewing and retouching a generated image to a usable standard — and the photograph comes with a release, metadata and a named photographer. Consistency across a set is also easier with one photographer than with a model that reinterprets your brief each time.

Our position

Every image on Photofolio is a real photograph by a named photographer, with the licence and provenance carried in the file and the page’s structured data. Browse our human-made collection, or read our licence.