Reflecting on five years of our Age-positive Image Library
20/10/25
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Our Age-positive image library has been hitting milestone after milestone since launching five years ago, with our photos now having reached 500,000 downloads.
Dora Buckle, our Digital Marketing and Content Manager who manages the library, details its many achievements and makes the case for why positive and realistic photos of older people are more important than ever.
The reason for us creating an Age-positive image library in 2021 was simple: we noticed that there was a significant dearth of older people in stock photos. The few photos that did exist were often negative or reaffirmed damaging stereotypes about later life.
For instance, how many articles about older people have you read where the only photo used is of someone’s wrinkled hands? This dehumanising image sustains the stereotype that ageing is predominantly about frailty, decline and dependency - an association that is commonly overestimated.
We already knew from our research that how we are represented as we grow older can have a profound impact on other people’s beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours towards us.
We decided that the representation of older people could be and should be better.
The first of its kind
Our Age-positive image library, which is part of our Age Without Limits campaign, is the first stock image bank in the world to solely focus on positive and realistic photos of people over 50. Our vision was a collection of photos that focused on a more nuanced, varied and diverse depiction of older age.
To reflect this, our photos include older workers, intergenerational friendships, community groups, sports, couples in love, travelling, campaigning, people trying new hobbies, and connecting with family. We also made every effort for our image library to be as diverse as possible, in terms of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, income and location.
Another part of our strategy with launching the library was to encourage as many media outlets, charities and marketers to use our photos as possible, so that eventually stereotypical photos of older people will be a thing of the past.
To enable this, it was critical for these photos to be as widely accessible as possible, so not only are they licenced so that any individuals and organisations can use them, they’re also free.
The success of our image library
It's been fantastic to see how much this project has resonated with the public, with huge demand for more photos.
In fact, in the last few years our photos have achieved:
- Over 115 million views
- Over 500,000 downloads
- 93% surveyed agree with the statement “The Age-positive image library is a valuable resource that challenges negative stereotypes of getting older”
- When we started, we had just over 400 photos. We now have nearly 4,000.
If you’d like to find out more about the impact our library has had, and what we’ve learned along the way, you can read our impact report here.
What’s next?
Managing the library has been a real highlight of my role at Ageing Better. I love going to shoots and meeting older people sharing their real experiences for our library (we rarely use professional models), and finally seeing themselves represented. I love working with our talented framework of photographers. I love working with other charities to produce joint image library collections. I love hearing from organisations, and professionals about how using the library has helped them in their work.
The image library is a fantastic resource that influences others to change the way they depict older people. This new impact report is testament to the fact that we’re already making a difference. But our work isn’t done yet.
I see the image library as a continually growing, evolving project. We want to keep building a bigger, more diverse illustration of what ageing means.
An important part of this for us is continuing seek feedback from people over 50 as well as image library users to guide future photoshoots. We also look forward to future partnerships with other organisations and brands. If you are interested in working together on a joint collection, please get in touch!
The image library is a project we as an organisation are very proud of. We look forward to continuing this momentum and achieving even greater milestones. We want to continue to grow and evolve our image library, to continue to change the way older people are represented, and ultimately through getting our images out into the world, challenge ageism. Watch this space!