The hard thing with this kind of search engine is that if it gets it wrong, the user is the one who takes on the liability.
I would pay a license fee and so would a lot of smaller sites if you had insurance and indemnification if they got sued.
However much I dislike Unsplash, and that's quite a bit, I do think there's a interesting benefit to their paid offer where if you use an unsplash image and it turns out that actually copyrighted (e.g. someone who is not the photographer who uploads the image and then the photographer sues you for using the image), Getty will defend you / pay your legal fees.
Right now I'm very particular about using things labeled out of copyright or uncopyrighted. Even things that are in the Flickr Commons or on NASA's site can be suspect.
For instance I just ran across a company logo uploaded by the San Diego aviation museum that's listed as out of copyright in Flickr Commons, but I strongly suspect it's still copyrighted. On NASA's site, I've seen images attributed to SpaceX and don't trust them at all not to sue.
Given that the penalty for being wrong on copyright can be insanely high even if you have the best intentions, I would really like a source that I could trust and would pay to be indemnified.
I ran into this recently. I was looking for a image of clown fish on Flickr with their license based search. I found a great one. I downloaded it and then started making the attribution where on I clicked through to the link of the photographer, or rather the their flickr account. It was immediately super clear it was a fake account with a few 1000 stolen images since there was just too much work and too much diversity in the images. I reverse searched for a few and found some of them on flickr and posted much further in the past and they were "all rights reserved"
Flickr is one of the better websites for this. I've seen a few websites with CC work where uploaders barely had any profile information. A simple "I take all the photos I upload and I know what CC means" would suffice. Ironically, the one that felt the "safest" was someone who linked to their Instagram where they posted photos. Instagram doesn't provide CC info, so this person went through the effort of creating an account in a different website just to reupload their photos that are CC.
I was making some photo editing tutorials and I ran into a similar problem. I needed a photo of a person. Turns out photos of people have their own additional set of legal problems (right to one's own image). This made me very worried because surely all these photographers who are marking their photos as CC have the consent of the models, right? Otherwise nobody would be able to use the CC photos. What would be the point of a photo being CC if it was illegal to copy it anyway? I think some website had a license that said I couldn't portray the person in the photo in bad light, or something of sort, which was particularly problematic for me since I was looking for a photo of someone sufficiently ugly to make a tutorial about skin retouching.
There are people who do deliberately publish images of themselves under a permissive licence. Sometimes seen with photos for specific topics on Wikipedia (published on Wikimedia Commons). I can only guess at their motivations, but there seem to be a good deal of exhibitionists and copyleft idealists in that group.
If a photo is used on Wikipedia with the licence you need, there is a solid chance the vetting process was done thoroughly enough. For photos of a person this would the first place to look for me.
I would pay a license fee and so would a lot of smaller sites if you had insurance and indemnification if they got sued.
However much I dislike Unsplash, and that's quite a bit, I do think there's a interesting benefit to their paid offer where if you use an unsplash image and it turns out that actually copyrighted (e.g. someone who is not the photographer who uploads the image and then the photographer sues you for using the image), Getty will defend you / pay your legal fees.
Right now I'm very particular about using things labeled out of copyright or uncopyrighted. Even things that are in the Flickr Commons or on NASA's site can be suspect.
For instance I just ran across a company logo uploaded by the San Diego aviation museum that's listed as out of copyright in Flickr Commons, but I strongly suspect it's still copyrighted. On NASA's site, I've seen images attributed to SpaceX and don't trust them at all not to sue.
Given that the penalty for being wrong on copyright can be insanely high even if you have the best intentions, I would really like a source that I could trust and would pay to be indemnified.