You know, the kind of pictures featuring a group of attractive multi ethnical youngsters having a good time on a beach, on a mountain, in a city that CS and other sites use to look even cooler.
I’m against the use of such pictures, I think the pictures should be provided by members and not be staged and fake situations.
So I wonder and I don’t know where to ask.
Hey Hugo! We agree, actually! I’m not 100% sure about it at the moment but I think we are putting policies into place to be able to accept user submitted photos (all people photographed have to agree to the use of the photo) for our materials. At present, we do have some stock images floating around, but that will surely be replaced. Thanks for your feedback!
Do you have photos of your own you would consider submitting?
Do we have stock images? I thought they are all provided by volunteers. Maybe we should add a little info icon ⓘ stating the author to emphasize this?
Using user pics sounds nice, but it can be a hustle. I´ts not as easy as asking for pics.
To use an image for promotion you need a release signed by everyone in the picture, and if it´s taken on a private/recognizable place you may also need the release from the place, and of course you need to get rid of any branded items appearing on the pic (those are TM). Stock photos can be kind of “meh”, but they have already passed all this tests, so they are legally safer.
Source: I´m a photographer, a retoucher for stock/brand websites, and also went to law school.
Yeah it definitely can be logistically and legally more challenging to use user-submitted photos, but it’s something that we want to strive for. I’m glad @Hugo_Toutcourt brought it up.
We actually already have a pool of “approved” photos that volunteers have submitted that meet the requirements and Couchers.org has permission to use. Some of these photos are already being used (like the one on www.couchers.org landing page and the forum landing page - which is actually my photo!) and more will be used in the future. It would be great to have users submit even more photos for Couchers.org to use as the community continues to grow!
It would be awsome to see a real home pic instead of that IKE A catalog pic CS uses lol
It would be nice if we had some subbmit phic form or something like that, so people are encouraged to do it. =)
This would be really cool!!!
I think one reason we settled with asking only volunteers was that the submit forms are not really encouraging 
I also don’t think we will need that many pics for general promotion. But probably for the community pages? Is each local community going to have a banner pic? If so, who would put that and could it be considered user provided content or would it be promotional?
One way I could still imagine encouraging contribution is having a dedicated category on the forum. Members could just share photos and if we’d want to use one for real, we would only then reach out and ask for a usage agreement. We could also still restrict that category in some way, like having topic templates (title, location, photo) and new topics requiring moderator approval.