The Web’s Premier Free Photo Library Opens Up Its Vaults
The Web's Premier Free Photo Library Opens Up Its Vaults
If you're building an app or website and you need a photo of a pineapple, a beach in Okinawa, a young woman wearing sunglasses, or a monk feeding a tiger, check out Unsplash. The vast online repository features 200,000 high-resolution images, every one of them free to download and use however you like. Create an ad, illustrate a Medium post, assemble your next album cover, whatever.Some big names have grown hip to Unsplash. When Facebook launched its Slack competitor Workplace, it turned to Unsplash for marketing photos. Visit the Apple App Store and you'll see Unsplash photos in the screenshots of many apps appearing in the "featured" slot. But you don't have to be a tech company to quickly and easily mine the Unsplash archive. The company just made its primary developer tool available to everyone for free.The tool, called an API, allows anyone to write a program capable of downloading photos from Unsplash. This spares designers, developers, and others the tedium of browsing the website and downloading images individually. They can just write a bit of code to download whatever they need.Trello, an early Unsplash partner, already does this. It lets users add background photos to Trello boards, and it built the search feature into the slider menu on every board---exactly the kind of integration the API released Tuesday will allow. The API won't have any fees or limits, so developers can pull as many photos as they like, as often as they like.Shoot AroundThe web teems with places to find photos, but the quality skews toward "meh." What's more, quality images from the big libraries---Flickr, wire services, and commercial stock photography sites---often come with licenses that require a fee and restrict how you use the image. Unsplash changed all that three years ago.The company accepts only the most exemplary submissions from photographers who must demonstrate strong technique and submit images with a resolution of at least 3 megapixels. When Unsplash rejects a photo---typically because of poor lighting, composition, or excessive editing---it offers tips for improvement. Most of the photos are shot with DSLRs, so they're upward of 6 megapixels deep (though you see plenty of photos shot with a Google Pixel or iPhone 7). A growing community of some 40,000 photographers contribute to the site."We're almost covering the entire world," says co-founder and CEO Mikael Cho. "When the supermoon happened, we had some of the most-circulated shots of that moon from different countries."You see a common aesthetic at Unsplash---sort of a hipster, start-uppy vibe---but Cho says he aims to make the site more inclusive and a better representation of the worldwide community.On Good TermsOnce Unsplash posts a photo, anyone can download it and use it however they like at no cost through the Creative Commons Zero license. This progressive license, as opposed to a traditional "all rights reserved" copyright, guarantees that the person downloading the photo can copy, alter, and distribute it for free, and even use it in advertisements and commercial products. CC Zero essentially releases every Unsplash photo into the public domain.Creative Commons Zero is widely known among creatives but less so within the mainstream, so Cho's team finds itself educating users. A link at the top of Unsplash's homepage reads, "do whatever you want." Click it, and you'll see a one-sentence statement describing the license in plain language. On Flickr and other sites like it, photographers release their photos under one of several Creative Commons licenses, each with its own limitations on things like alteration or commercial use. It gets confusing quickly. "We removed any sort of asterisk," Cho says.