Find the Right Stock Photo — independently scanned and version-tracked by SaferSkills.
SaferSkills independently audited Find the Right Stock Photo (Agent Skill) and scored it 100/100 (green). The audit ran 55 deterministic rules across Security, Supply Chain, Maintenance, Transparency, and Community; it found 0 high-severity and 0 lower-severity findings. The full rule-by-rule trace and per-finding evidence are below. Free, methodology-open.
Findings & checks · 0 flagged
Every scanned point with the score it earned and what moved between them.
First recorded scan — no prior version to compare against.
The primary manifest — the file an agent reads to learn what this artifact does.
This skill gets you from "I need an image of X" to a short list of strong candidates from the right source. It owns two decisions: which library to search and what to type into it. It does not decide whether you may legally use the result (that is image-license-rights), it does not fetch images in code (that is stock-photo-api), and it does not turn a pile of candidates into a cohesive, on-brand set (that is visual-asset-curation).
image-license-rights. Always run it before you ship anything commercial.
stock-photo-api.
cheap?" -> visual-asset-curation**.
Never search before you can fill this in. Vague searches return the most generic, most-used (most cliched) images on the platform.
orientation and resolution.
illustrating a story/news (editorial)? This changes which sources are even legal. Hand the call to image-license-rights if unsure.
Match the brief to a library before you search. The order below is the default decision path.
catalogs, generous licenses, no cost. Trade-off: the popular shots are heavily reused - a first-page result on these platforms can have hundreds of thousands of downloads, which is exactly why it reads as "stock". Best for blogs, side projects, MVPs, and backgrounds. Pexels and Pixabay also carry free stock video.
Stock.** Smaller, art-directed collections that dodge the cliche look. Reach here when the free libraries feel generic or the brand needs to look considered. (Verify the license tier on the provider before relying on it - see image-license-rights.)
iStock / Getty RF.** When you need a specific, hard-to-find shot and want model/property releases already in place for commercial use. Subscriptions or credit packs.
Images, AP, Reuters.* These are editorial-use-only unless explicitly licensed otherwise - you cannot use them to imply endorsement or to advertise. This is a licensing trap; confirm with image-license-rights*.
Freepik, unDraw, or icon-specific libraries. (Photo search heuristics below still apply.)
Rule of thumb: start free for anything internal or low-stakes; move to curated or paid the moment the image is the hero of a brand-facing surface.
Search like a photo editor, not like Google.
not "productivity". Abstractions return the worst stock cliches.
"founder laptop coffee shop candid".
portrait / square), color, "people / no people", and (on paid sites) number of people, age, and editorial vs commercial toggles.
try "whiteboard sketching", "two people reviewing a screen", "office hallway". The strongest shot is often one query sideways from the obvious one. Run at least 3 query variants before settling, and scroll past the first page or two of results on free libraries - that is where the least-reused shots live.
negative space on one side for text; a phone splash needs portrait. Filter for it rather than cropping a square later.
For each shortlisted image, check, in order:
needs an original of roughly 2400px or more on the long edge (about 2x the rendered slot for retina screens); social posts and thumbnails need at least ~1080px. Avoid upscaling.
release-required shots and pass them to image-license-rights before committing.
for commercial use. Note it; do not assume the platform handled it (free libraries often have not).
"teamwork"? If the set looks generic, hand the finalists to visual-asset-curation to tighten and de-cliche.
Produce a shortlist of 3-8 candidate images, each with: the source URL, the library and license type, resolution and orientation, and any editorial-only or release-required flag - plus the one-line brief and the queries that produced the set, so the search can be re-run or extended. Hand the shortlist to image-license-rights before anything ships commercially.
habit.
shots are the most reused, and readers have seen them on ten other sites.
the platform's worst cliches; translate the concept into a photographable scene first.
landing pages, or anything commercial - editorial-use-only is a legal line, not a suggestion.
hero loses composition and resolution; filter for the right orientation at search time.
images of identifiable people and logos with no model or property release attached.
untraceable image is an unlicensable image.
~30 seconds. Free. No account. Every finding cites a rule and a line of evidence.