Diverse Imagery

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
November 4, 2022
2 replies
1186 views

Am I the only one who is kind of appalled at the lack of default diverse imagery within Stock? I just recently switched my team over to Stock from Getty, and I am shocked to see there is no filter for drilling down to specific ethnicities or even just giving me a broad range of diverse skin tones. EVERYTHING I see in a general search is white skin. How can this be? Am I missing something? How are we supposed to market like this?

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Jill_C

Community Expert

I just did a few quick queries and found many, many faces of diversity. "Woman African American" returns 5.5M results. "Woman+Asian" returns 4.2M results. I sampled other combinations and found many images. Of course, as with any subject, effective use of keywords by Stock Contributors is essential in making images searchable.

Mat Hayward, Adobe Stock Evangelist, covers Adobe's focus on diverse and inclusive images:

https://www.crowdcast.io/e/adobestock101/register

Jill C., Forum Volunteer

M1StorytellerAuthor

Inspiring

I appreciate this response - and the link to the D&I work Mat is doing. I am sure Adobe is making the effort. I am a new user to Stock, and these are just my early observations (fresh off of a Getty subscription). This kind of guidance is certainly helpful - getting granular with my search terms. Still, my original post was looking at this from a default viewpoint. As I said, I am really surprised by the general search results. Unless I specify an ethnicity, the database is returning with overwhelmingly white assets.

Jill_C

Community Expert

I certainly understand your point. I'm struggling to comprehend how Adobe could "mix it up" a little better so that queries for images featuring humans are served up in a more balanced / diverse way. Images are just Assets as far as the search algorithm is concerned, and images with humans aren't treated any differently than images with flowers. (That's my assumption; I have no inside knowledge on how the algorithm works.) If you search for "rose" you'll get nearly 5M results, and page after page of them are red or pink, with very few other colors displayed. That is because 1) previously sold images float to the top of the list, and 2) red/pink are the primary colors for roses. If you search for "rose+orange" you'll get a mere ~315k results.

Jill C., Forum Volunteer

WendellaBee

Adobe Employee

see this thread regarding diverse content... https://community.adobe.com/t5/stock-discussions/how-to-find-adobe-stock-advocates-work-indigenous-creators/td-p/12373391

M1StorytellerAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks for the quick reply. I had already found that thread. It's a start, and I am glad for that, but seems woefully lacking in 2022 - especially consdering it appears that it was kickstarted as early as the beginning of 2021. As a user, am I supposed to bookmark these individual collections and search within them? To me, the whole idea of a stock imagery service is to start wide and then hone in. Are these collections not visible in a broad Stock search?

M1StorytellerAuthor

Inspiring

Additionally, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but a general search yields white/caucasion assets. Only if I include black, brown, Hispanic, Asian, African American, etc. do I get more diverse imagery. Is this not implicit bias? A generic search should give me a cross-section of options. In other words, if "white" is the default, we have a problem. I'm asking as someone who wants to see the product and platform improve, so this isn't from a place of judgement. Adobe appears to be on the path to fixing this - like many others. This just feels like an obvious fix, though I'm willing to acknowledge I don't know what all work goes into this behind the scenes to make such a change.

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