GIS Syndrome

"I retire to my heavily processed photograph of Andrew Carnegie's study, painstakingly retrieved from a Google image search."

— Andrew Hussie (the character), Homestuck

A common shortcut that creators use is to collect pictures from Google Image Search and use them as a background. These images are usually run through a filter (almost always some type of blur) on Photoshop, either to lessen focus or to make the image more congruent with the art style. This is often utilized for complex designs (book and video game covers are common examples), or done for intentional stylistic choices, but can be seen as a sign of laziness if the artist comes to depend on it.

In some cases, the artist is lazy enough that he picks the first fitting image from the first results page, thus allowing bored fans to guess their search query and find the original images easily. Laziness and ignorance can also get authors in much more serious trouble — for some reason, people tend to think that anything found via GIS is fair game, when of course it's still all covered by copyright law.

Note that GIS Syndrome isn't limited to Google Images as lazy creators also use Bing Image Search and DuckDuckGo Image search.

No relation to Geographic Information Systems, which aren't used by artists nearly as much, unless artists want to create their own real-world modern-day maps.

Not to be confused with a Photo Comic, which uses photographs as the art instead of an embellishment. See also Real-Place Background. Contrast Matte Shot, where real people stand in front of a painted background. Compare Traced Artwork, when a creator copies existing art by hand. For when this intentionally used as a stylistic choice, see Medium Blending.

---

Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Played for Laughs in Kaguya-sama: Love Is War where Aka Akasaka tricked his publisher into paying for him to take a vacation to India under the guise of it being a research trip, then pumped out a single joke chapter featuring Maki with all the backgrounds being the photos he took with a filter over them. Pretty much everyone we see in the chapter other than Maki and her brother are likewise appear to just be traced over photos of people he met on his trip.
• The King of Fighters: Kyo manga by Masato Natsumoto makes heavy use of this, even in scenes like Kyo and Iori coming across each other in the street.

Art

• Some art critics have pointed out that George W. Bush's series of amateur portraits of world leaders, on display at his presidential library, bear a striking resemblance to pictures that appear on the first page of Google Images results for their names.

Comic Books

• The Free Comic Book Day issue of Scott Pilgrim contains a lampshaded example of this.
  "Okay, this background looks really hard to draw and I don't think I'm getting paid for this comic, so enjoy this stock photo."

Fan Works

• Evangelion 303: Grummancat is perfectly capable of drawing backgrounds, so this mostly crops up for large-scale backgrounds like the desert and city scenes.

Literature

• Indie authors publishing via Amazon Kindle or Smashwords often end up with covers that are made from a bunch of stock assets from vendors like Getty Images, Photoshopped together into something that might or might not resemble the contents of the book, simply because anything fancier is too expensive.

Newspaper Comics

• Working Daze has been starting to use photo backgrounds to depict areas outside the office along with other art experimentation. The writer and artist team encourage readers to guess where the photo came from.

Tabletop Games

• The kaiju collectible card series, Pachimon, have half of them being made using this trope, by painting kaiju artwork on top of existing pictures, especially notable in the series' "World Tour" collection. One of those cards is simply a pair of monsters painted on Mount Rushmore, while another overlaps with Unusually Uninteresting Sight by pasting the painted image of a rampaging monster across a postcard depicting London, so Londoners are simply unfazed at the sight of a fifty-foot monster in the streets.

Video Games

• The 1992 fantasy-themed arcade game, Agony (not to be confused with a 2018 game sharing the same title) extensively uses photographs of real-life environments with fantasy elements painted upon, mostly because of budget issues and also because of it's limited employee due to being an indie game. The graphic artist, Frank Sauer, actually revealed the title screen was made from a photo he took from his apartment.
• The Rail Shooter Gaia Attack 4 pretty much runs on this. Each and every stage is in live footage, with computer-animated monsters and aliens showing up to attack the players.
• Hard Line uses real-life photos, mostly shot in old warehouses or empty garages, to depict Detroit in the post-apocalypse, with hostile robots and scavengers superimposed over.
• The "creators" of Limbo of the Lost have apparently used Google Image Search themselves to take various images for use as inventory items.
• The original release of RE: Alistair had real photographs for backgrounds; subsequent releases had them replaced by drawn images.
  • Many low-budget or freeware Visual Novels use stock backgrounds, actually, probably because actually drawing one would take time and resources the artists don't have.
• Stock images make up many of the backgrounds in the Visual Novel-style Charon RPG Maker games.
• CrazyBus features stock photos of buses for its backgrounds. They also look rather ugly, as they had to be compressed to be put on the Sega Genesis.
• The iPad adventure game Lechuza was made almost entirely with art assets found on Google Image Search, as noted in this playthrough video from our friends slowbeef and Diabetus of Retsupurae. In the respective Something Awful thread, the goons managed to track down almost every single stolen art asset using Google Image Search.
• In Mass Effect 3, there were two cases of taking images and modifying them, one being the post-ending epilogue image, and the other being the photograph of Tali's face.
• Apparently, the art of Civilization V had been redesigned shortly before release, forcing the developers to rely on this technique for their button graphics, which drew some ridicule from the community.
• Happens during an event in Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver where you have to take Arceus—basically the verse's equivalent to God—to a certain room and he proceeds to recreate the universe from scratch to give you an egg containing one of the cover legendaries for the other Gen IV games. This process is illustrated starting with stock images of space and stars and how the Earth may have looked, up to single-celled organisms and finally civilizations by showing overhead satellite shots or skylines of big cities. As one YouTube commenter put it: "Arceus used Google Image Search!"
  • Likely the cause of a fan-made map of the world from serebii.net ending up on the wall of a house in Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. Hilariously, the devs tried to disguise the fact by flipping the pic horizontally.
• Androx Demon of Fire, a hilariously terrible (and now cancelled) RPG mocked by Retsupurae in this Kickstarter video series, used a hilariously out of place volcano background from Google Images in part of the lava area. It doesn't work with the top down graphics style in the slightest.
• Ōkami had an infamous example where the cover of the Wii version was pulled from a search engine. If you look carefully at the cover, you will see an IGN watermark. This was, of all things, because they had lost the original image file.
• FTL: Faster Than Light uses some NASA photographies for backgrounds. They are properly credited in the readme file.
• The banner ads for Evony (and others that have followed its example) oft included scantily clad women who never appear in game, chiefly because many of those images were lifted from various other sources, from uncredited artists to copyrighted material.
• Played for Laughs in Deltarune. The explosion effects used are a stock image rather than proper pixel art. Additionally, the two pacifist-enforced mini-bosses in Chapter 1 and 2 (K.Round and Sweet Cap'n Cakes) use a pixelated stock image of a carton of almond milk to heal themselves.
• Kang Fu mostly uses compressed stock images for level backgrounds or background objects.
• PAYDAY 2 has one heist taking place inside an FBI headquarters. The medical room has cabinets that act as health kits for the player to heal with. Inside the cabinets are common medicines for colds, stomachaches, and so on. The textures for said medicines are directly ripped from the Kirkland Signature brand without any alterations on the textures.
• Demon Hunter: The Return of the Wings: For no reason in particular, the top of the Tower of Sin uses Earth's moon as the background despite being in another world.

Visual Novels

• In contrast to the usual Visual Novel use of GIS for backgrounds, Hatoful Boyfriend uses stock photos for all the bird characters, and for loading screens between chapters. Stock photo resources are cited and thanked in the credits.
• Used pervasively in Psycholonials. All the backgrounds in the game are real photographs, with heavy pixelation and color filters applied, and only the characters actually drawn. One scene featuring a character traveling outside even uses a Google Maps satellite street map from a real place as the backdrop.

Web Animation

• Happens just as often as in case of webcomics, whether directly in Clip-Art Animation or traced in Flash. Any time a pistol appears, it's this◊ picture of a CZ-75. More egregious, if a shotgun is supposed to appear, it's usually this◊ airsoft shotgun. A bomb? Likely this one.◊ And so on.
• Zero Punctuation consists of exactly four visual elements: A stubborn refusal to ever change the yellow background, white figures with Floating Limbs, imps, and pictures he took off Google images. One in particular that keeps cropping up is the Thomas Ruff portrait that, according to Word of God, he found by searching for "expressionless man".
• Other than effects and characters, Taiwanese illustrator VOFAN's animated film 1/60 is composed entirely of photographs. Because the film is all about photography, it's an interesting deconstruction of this trope.
• Homestar Runner:
  • In the Strong Bad Email "isp", an Easter egg shows Homestar's weight in sign-up CDs in a generic empty room.
  • On the FeedBurner page, the entry about donating to the Homestar Runner Wiki is accompanied by an edited image of a telethon.
• GoAnimate: It's not uncommon for users to insert familiar characters into the GoAnimate/Vyond setting via stock images of them from off the internet. Here's one such example of this.

Webcomics

• 8-Bit Theater: Early comics used a combination of original but very low-quality digital art and sprites, but it eventually transitioned to using image-search backgrounds in almost every comic.
• A Beginner's Guide to the End of the Universe: Exaggerated. Grayscale photographs are used for every element of the comic, from backgrounds to items and creatures, except for stick figure people and interface elements.
• Candi did this for a while before going back to drawn backgrounds.
• Ctrl+Alt+Del, usually for various movie posters hanging on the walls. Game consoles also used to be this, most notably Ethan's Gamecube.
• Irregular Webcomic!, a LEGO comic, uses (copyright-free or self-taken) photo backgrounds when LEGO isn't enough.
• Used by the comic Jayden And Crusader frequently, almost always to make up for lack of artistic ability
• Spleen Tea, specifically the mugshots. Justified somewhat, as it is a review site using pictures of the product in question.
• MS Paint Adventures uses black-and-white (usually pixellated) photos for most background objects. It's used for comic effect since the photo detail contrasts so highly with the stickfigure-esque characters.
  • Sometimes, mostly with landscape from Homestuck Act Four onward, pictures are recolored to match colors. In a few cases this ends up looking odd, to say the least. Also, there's a tendency for such images to be the underlay for additional background illustrations, for example the Land of Wind and Shade (which draws certain features like rivers and mushrooms on top of pictures of landscapes).
  • And of course, much as you'd expect, Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff occasionally does this for Stylistic Suck purposes, often picking the most severely watermarked image possible.
• Everyday Heroes does this occasionally. The last panel of this comic is one example.
• UG Madness ocasionaly did this in its early days, usually in the form of pictures on the wall.
• Asperchu does this for most outdoor scenes. Which still puts it ahead of its inspiration by actually having backgrounds.
• The latest episode of The Fan started using photos for occasional outdoor backgrounds. The pictures are taken by the author himself, of more or less the actual locations where the scene is supposed to take place.
• A Beginner's Guide to the End of the Universe uses this for everything but interface elements and the stick figure humans.
  • Same goes for its sequel, Chairman Jack: Emerge.
• Powerup Comics spoofed this in one strip, where the background had a giant iStockphoto watermark.
• This trope is an oft occurring one within' the BZPower Comics community, especially in Nuparurocks' Comics most often are these pictures blended in well due to the Sprite nature of said comics. But there are times when it's used less successfully.
• Even In The Deepest Heart Of Chaos A Glimmer Of Order Can Be Found is composed of nothing but a selection of random Flickr photos.
• Waterworks uses this occasionally, mainly for inventory items, as well as the backgrounds in a particular character's flashback.
• Doki Doki Literature Girls uses this as well with the in-universe justification that Monika, whose ability to reprogram the game world is somewhat limited when it comes to physically creating new places and objects, does often resort to using search engines as a shortcut.
  Sayori: This couch is so comfy! Where did you find it?
  Monika: Same as everything else, Google Images.
• Legend of Legendary Mighty Knight uses this as part of an Art Shift for one panel- the soup the knight feeds to the dragon tastes so good the next panel shows the dragon's shocked expression superimposed over a GIF of rapidly changing photographs of galaxies.
• Some Korean Webtoons use a variant; a photo with a filter put over it to make it look like a drawing. Weak Hero does this a lot, both with backgrounds, bizarrely with food, and even more bizarrely with shoes.

Web Original

• In a Let's Play of Donkey Kong 64, Dazzling Addar changes day to night for the first time in the Fungi Forest level. When they look at the moon:
  Vicas: Oh, wow, they, they, like... If Google had, like, had an image search back then, they would've just Google image searched the moon and stuck it right there.
• Lampshaded on Third Rate Gamer, where an image of a castle is labeled "Castle of Google Images".
• Googlebrains explicitly and proudly uses stock images of quite a few of his characters.
• The Weather: Everything from backgrounds, to objects, to characters, are just Google stock-images. The Wham City members are green-screened into the scene, either with their full-bodies or just their faces, and the callers take on immobile clip-art characters with moving faces.
• The image of Super Mecha Death Christ 2000 from The Angry Video Game Nerd is stitched from variety of sources, including but not limited to Picard's Borg implant, as well as the rocket launcher and the APC vehicle from Red Faction.

Western Animation

• Many of the 11-minute [adult swim] comedies blatantly use this, especially the "cruder" ones. Such common examples are Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Tom Goes to the Mayor (although both use it for the Stylistic Suck).
• The Amazing World of Gumball uses photographs for almost all its backgrounds. The more recurring ones were taken by the crew especially for the show, but others are stock pictures taken from a couple different sources (including Shutter Stock).
• High Guardian Spice frequently uses stock images for assets, like a loaf of bread or a lamppost.
• Early episodes of South Park used a lot of stock photos as background elements.

Real Life

• BBC News once used the logo of Halo's United Nations Space Command instead of that of the United Nations Security Council, probably because searching for "UNSC" online only returns results for the former.
• A Turning Point USA student summit introduced a speech by President Donald Trump by projecting a parody version of the Presidential Seal filled with jokes at Trump's expense. An event organizer blamed "a rushed online search" for the graphic.
• Not quite fitting the trope, since it's not an image, but after a Kazakh athlete won a gold medal at a sporting contest in the Middle East, the organizers played the Borat version of her country's national anthem rather than the real one. They blamed a too-cursory Internet search.
  • Also in a similar vein, "Glory to Hong Kong", the song of the 2019 Hong Kong pro-democracy protests was played to introduce the Hong Kong team at the 2022 Rugby Sevens in South Korea instead of "March of the Volunteers", China's national anthem. They also blamed a too-cursory internet search.

---