Where the artwork comes from
Default covers are drawn, not photographed. Where a real photograph is used, it carries its credit with it.
Generated plate art, not stock photography
Most articles on this site open with a piece of architectural plate art: a cream ground, drawn linework and a single muted accent. Those covers are generated by a script in this repository, scripts/generate-covers.mjs, which seeds each composition from the article slug so that every plate is different and always the same for a given article.
The reason is straightforward. Freely licensed image libraries cannot be relied on to return usable interior photography for a given subject, and the alternative, buying generic stock, gives you the same three rooms that appear on every other design site. Drawn plates read as a deliberate editorial device rather than as a missing photograph, they weigh a few kilobytes, and nothing is implied about a room that was never built.
Each cover is produced twice: a vector version, which is what the pages render, and a raster version at 1600 by 1000 pixels for social cards, because crawlers and chat apps will not render a vector preview.
Photographs
A real photograph always beats a plate. When a photograph is uploaded through the admin media library and set as an article's cover, the plate is never shown for that article again, and the credit is stored with the image and printed on the article itself rather than only here.
Photographs are used only where the licence permits it, and the credit line names the photographer or rights holder and the licence. Where a licence requires a link to its terms, that link runs with the credit. Photographs supplied by a designer, a studio or a reader are used with permission and credited to the person or practice that made them.
Editing is limited to what does not change the room: cropping, straightening, and exposure or white balance correction. We do not composite, remove obstructions or add furniture.
Corrections to a credit
If a credit here is wrong, incomplete, or attached to the wrong image, tell us through the contact form and choose Correction. Name the page and the image and we will fix the credit, or remove the image while we check.
The same applies if you hold rights in a photograph and would rather it was not used. It comes down, and we do not argue about it first.