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MobileIQ

Device photography policy

One product photograph per device page, at most, and every one of them the maker’s own press image, credited beneath it and linked to the page it was taken from. This page says what is on the site, what the legal position is, and how a picture comes down.

What is on the site

One product photograph per device page, at most. Every one of them is the manufacturer’s own press image, taken from the manufacturer’s own press channel: Apple Newsroom, Samsung Newsroom and Samsung Mobile Press, the Google blog and the Google Store. No third-party sources: no GSMArena, no review-site galleries, no retailer product shots, no stock libraries, no fan renders. If a manufacturer never published a press image we can identify as that specific model, the device gets no photograph and its page is led by the technical drawing instead. That has already happened with the iPhone 17 Pro Max, for which Apple’s launch article carries no asset distinguishable from the iPhone 17 Pro, and a Pro captioned as a Pro Max would be a picture of a phone that is not the phone.

26 of the 55 phones in the catalogue currently carry a photograph, 26 of the 94 devices in all; the rest are led by the drawing until a press image has been found and credited. The credit link on each one points at the page the file was actually taken from, not at a tidier page about the same product.

The files are self-hosted at /images/devices/{slug}.jpg rather than hotlinked. That is deliberate and it is not an attempt to obscure anything: hotlinking spends someone else’s bandwidth on our traffic and breaks the page the day they reorganise a CDN path. Each file is kept under 500 kB, and a test fails the build if one is not.

The files are otherwise as published, with two mechanical exceptions worth stating because “unmodified” should mean what it says. Where an article offered several renditions we took a smaller one. Where the only asset was WebP or PNG we transcoded it to JPEG, and where that asset had an alpha channel we composited it onto white first; a JPEG has no transparency and the alternative default is black. Nothing has been cropped, retouched, recoloured or had a watermark removed.

Two departures from “the announcement article”, both because the article had nothing usable: the Pixel 10 image comes from Google’s own store page, there being no clean base-model product shot in the Made by Google 2025 post; and the Pixel 8a image is Google’s launch key art, which carries a “Google Pixel 8a” wordmark, the only alternatives on that page being a lifestyle shot with a person in it. Both are still Google’s own images on Google’s own hosts, and both are credited to what they actually are.

Every photograph carries a visible credit directly beneath it — “Image: Apple Newsroom” — linking the article it came from. The credit is not optional and cannot be forgotten: the device schema refuses a device that sets an image without an image source, so an uncredited photograph fails the build rather than reaching the site.

These images are used with attribution and without a licence. We believe the use is one manufacturers tolerate — a single credited product shot on an editorial specification page, linked to their own announcement, driving traffic to it — but tolerated is not licensed, and nothing on this site claims these images are public domain, freely licensed, or ours.

Permission requests to the Apple, Samsung and Google press offices, asking for permission and for their preferred assets, are drafted and have not yet been sent. This page will say when they are, and what was answered. Until an answer comes back the position above is the position.

If any rights holder objects, to one image or to all of them, we remove them immediately and without argument — write to [email protected] — and the technical drawings resume as the lead image on those pages. The drawings were the site’s only illustration before there were photographs, they still render on every catalogue card and every comparison overlay, and they remain on the device pages themselves, so removal costs the pages a photograph, not a layout.

How an image is removed

Per device, three deletions and a push:

  1. Delete the file at public/images/devices/{slug}.jpg.
  2. Delete the image and image_source fields from the device’s data file.
  3. Commit and push. The site redeploys.

The page reverts to the drawing-led hero automatically: the drawing moves back up into the masthead, the credit line disappears, and the social card image and the structured data’s image stop being emitted. Nothing else needs touching, and the test suite fails if one of the two fields has been removed and not the other, or a file has been left orphaned in the folder.

To remove all photography: delete every file in the folder, strip the same two fields from every device file, push. Every page returns to exactly how it rendered before there was a photograph on any of them.