Every project reaches the point where somebody drops an image into the repo and nobody asks where it came from. It is usually fine. When it is not fine, it surfaces months later as a takedown notice or an invoice, and by then the image is in a build artifact, a CDN cache and a dozen social previews.
There are only two questions that actually matter, and almost every free-image problem is one of them going unasked.
Question One: Does The License Permit Commercial Use
Commercial use is broader than people assume. It is not just merch. A company website, an advertisement, a marketing email, product packaging, or any site that earns through ads generally counts. If the image supports something meant to make money, hold it to the higher standard.
Public domain and CC0 are the low friction defaults. Both permit commercial use with no attribution required, which means nothing to remember and nothing to break when someone refactors the footer. CC BY permits commercial use too, but only if you actually render the credit, and a credit that lives in a comment in the JSX rather than on the page is not a credit. NonCommercial licenses forbid it outright, personal-use-only images do the same, and an image whose license you cannot confirm should be treated as off limits, because that is exactly where the cost of being wrong is highest.
AI generated images are a separate question again, because the rights come from the tool's terms rather than from any general rule. Some generators grant full commercial rights on the free tier, others reserve them for paid plans. The specific tool's terms are the answer. We wrote the full version of this up at can you use free images for commercial use.
Question Two: Does Anything In The Frame Need A Release
This is the one that catches teams, because it is invisible in the license file. The license covers copyright in the photograph. It does not cover the likeness of a recognizable person in the shot, artwork hanging on the wall behind them, or a branded product sitting on the table. Those need a model or property release, and the release is separate from and additional to the license.
So a CC0 photo of a person is not automatically safe to put on a landing page for a paid product. The photographer released their copyright. The person in the frame did not necessarily release their likeness.
This is one place generation genuinely reduces risk. A generated person is not a real person, so there is no likeness to clear. It is not a blanket exemption, since generators can still emit recognizable trademarks and lookalikes, but for the common case of needing a human in a header image, generating one removes a whole category of problem.
Stock Or Generate, Practically
Reach for stock when the viewer needs to believe the thing is real. Real faces, real product shots, recognizable places. Models still stumble on the details a human eye catches instantly, hands with the wrong number of fingers, slightly melted backgrounds, faces that feel subtly off, so for testimonials and team pages a photograph is the safer choice.
Reach for generation when you need something that does not exist yet or that nobody else has. The most popular free stock photos appear on thousands of sites, which is exactly why so many pages feel generic. Concept headers, abstract illustrations, anything where standing out beats literal realism. The full comparison across realism, originality, cost and rights is in stock photos vs AI images.
Free generator tiers are real but they have edges worth knowing before you build a pipeline on one: a daily or monthly image cap, a queue at busy times, a lower maximum resolution, sometimes a watermark, and on some tools free-tier output lands in a public community gallery rather than staying private. That last one matters a lot more on client work than people expect. Our rundown of the best free AI image generators goes through which category of tool fits which job.
The Version To Put In Your Checklist
Before an image ships, confirm the license permits commercial use, and confirm nothing in the frame needs a release. Two lines in a PR template will catch nearly all of it, and both are far cheaper to answer now than after the image is in production.
Top comments (0)