27 Times People From Stock Photos Found Their Pics Being Used In Weird Ways

Not me, but my younger brother had his picture taken when he was about nine or ten for the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. My brother was a really cute red headed kid with freckles and they asked my mom if they could use his photo for their promotional materials. A few months later, we get a brochure in the mail with my brother's face on it talking about the Big Brother's program. It was really funny because they had changed his name to " Timmy" and in little kid handwriting written things like, " I reely need a big brotha" and " have you found me a big brotha yet?" And then ended it with " Love, Timmy". My siblings and I laughed a lot over it and called my brother " Timmy" for weeks.

I was asked to go to a big opening event party for a park in China. As a "foreigner" this kind of thing is pretty common, they want some white faces. Free food & drink, all the other guests had to pay. But in the end they start guilt tripping me... "Put on this traditional Chinese costume" they say, some kind of kung fu looking robe thing... "let us take some pictures" they say... Fine, I let them do it. A few weeks go by and random people start pointing me out in public. My students are giggling in class. Finally when I'm out and about someone approaches me... "are you the guy.. from..." and shows me a picture on the phone, my likeness in chinese traditional wear has been printed on building sized billboards around the city. I look goofy as [darn]. All around the city where I live and work.

My parents once went into a print shop near-ish to where they lived and saw a picture frame for sale with an oddly familiar looking stock photo in it for display. You know how frames usually come with some flimsy B&W stock photo of a couple or a family or something. Except it wasn't a stock photo, it was them on their wedding day!! Apparently their photographer had some kind of connection to the shop and had his photos on display there. My parents were definitely surprised to see their wedding pics on public display, but they thought it was cute :)

My father is a photographer and so my sister and I were models for stock photography. I was on shopping bags in Mexico, my sister was in a bank brochure. My favorite though is when my sister's high school science class was reading from a textbook an she sees a picture of me, putting mascara on in a mirror. She yelled out to the class, "Hey that's my sister!" Apparently it gave everyone a good laugh. On a less funny note, I was a kinda chubby kid so my dad did a whole shoot of me in a grey tracksuit looking sad on a scale, and pinching my belly fat in the mirror....etc....ended up on being used in a child obesity campaign. He didn't tell me what it was used in until years later.

I won a body transformation contest on a bodybuilding site when I was 17. 10 years later, I and others I knew started seeing my photos in ads for random supplements I had never heard of.

A friend of ours was in a commercial for herpes medication a couple of years after we graduated college, and we recognized him randomly while watching a show with my mother in law. We were like, “hey it’s [our friend] from school!” We went to a school with strong religious ties and my mother in law is very religious. Right after we said this my mother in law was appalled and said, “wait, he has herpes????!!!”

I had a very small modeling career in middle and high school. My first real photo shoot was for stock photos. The deal was around $100 and I signed the rights to the photos over to the photographer, but was able to add the photos to my portfolio. When I got the photos I hated them (I was super nervous and looked uncomfortable in most of them). Needless to say, I was never called back to that photographer. At the end of high school I had to decide if I was going to pursue modeling or go to college for teaching. I choose to be a teacher. Fast forward to 8 years later, one of my coworkers mentioned that the picture on the loading screen of the grading program looked like me. I never needed to use the program being the special education co-teacher. Well, we pulled up the gradebook and there it was, one of the awful stock photos I took. The photo was their logo and loading screen for several years. That company/program is used by school districts in over 70 countries. All of my surrounding counties also use it. I still find it funny that being a teacher is probably the only way I would have found out about it. Funny side story, my husband works at the same school and for three years of entering grades he did not notice that picture was me. When we finally showed him he said "Oh I did think you looked alot alike."