What are your thoughts on stock images for websites?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Wakefly, Inc.: My client is building a brand new e commerce website after they received a penalty from Google for bad links. As I am going through the site they have many categories and every category has a stock image that can be found all over the web doing a reverse image search. I am concerned about these pictures just because even though they show what the category is about, I am able to find the pictures all over the web. As a note I am not talking about stock pictures of the actual items to sell
  
  What are your thoughts on stock images for websites? Is it bad and will it create a penalty if Google see's the pictures all over the web?
  
  Thanks!
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  Dave Elliott: if its hosted on your site, google will only see the file name. its spiders can't see images. So as long as the it is being used legally it really wont make a difference to anything.
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  Devin Peterson: It won't cause a penalty... BUT, I'm going to give an opinion I have about images... There is software that can compare how similar images are and can even tell if they are duplicates... I would suspect a good search engine would employ this technology in their image search results. Sometimes I'm impressed about how FEW duplicates there are when I do a Google image search. I try to have original pictures when it's not a hassle. Of course you can still outrank other images that are the same as long as you better optimize other components like file name, alt, context, etc... My 1 1/2 cents.
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  Christopher Shaffer: Reverse image search works by looking at how similar pictures are, computers are not smart enough YET to tell what the image is of, just that the colors on a pixel by pixel basis are the same.
  
  Best Practice would always be to have only original content. That being said, original and compelling content is exceptionally hard to come across in the ecom world. You won't get slapped for using pictures (as long as you use them legally) and as was mentioned before, you still have the potential to outrank your competitors simply by optimizing correctly.
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  W.E. Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:01:48 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/what_are_your_thoughts_on_stock_images_for_websites +Wakefly, Inc.