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Unsplash 4.0 — Free (do whatever you want) high-res photos
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I always love these types of sites. well done @mikaelcho and team. I'm totally curious, what's the business model motivation behind building sites/repositiories like this?
This adds to the list of royalty free photo sites. :) :)
I rank Unsplash 4.0, the newest version, as the tops. insert hand clapping emoticons.
https://pixabay.com/
http://thestocks.im/
https://www.foap.com/
http://allthefreestock.com/
http://finda.photo/
http://www.imagesource.com/royal...
https://www.pexels.com/
http://www.publicdomainpictures....
http://splitshire.com/
http://www.1millionfreepictures....
http://viintage.com/
http://www.gratisography.com/
http://littlevisuals.co/
http://www.pdpics.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bri...
http://nos.twnsnd.co/
http://pickupimage.com/
http://publicdomainarchive.com/
http://www.gettyimages.com/creat...
@mikaelcho These are great news and it's inspiring to see the great impact and use of something that started as a side project.
You already know how you guys inspired us in building successful side projects, so - with there was a reaction here other than "upvote" because then I'd use the "WoW" one.
Keep it up. my first collection is up!
Upvoting because this product helped me so, so many times in my web design days. Thanks @mikaelcho!
This is one of the most resourceful and beautiful stock photo gallery site I've ever seen. Excellent work, Unsplash team!
It's easy, with major changes/shifts, to build something a little more bulky and forget the simplicity and minimalism that made it special. With Unsplash? Everything still feels right. The overall layout remains excellent and the core reason I use it is still intact, just built around to build something more awesome. Truly an excellent addition and props to the team of Unsplash. 💯
@techvoltz wow thank you Nikhil — that means a lot to hear. Our team has worked really hard to keep the photographs front and center — as that's something we think is unique about Unsplash. Means a lot to hear you recognize it though. Cheers.
@mikaelcho @unsplash That's amazing news the best stock service on the internet just got even more unreal! Awesome work!
Pexels, Unsplash, and Death to The Stock Photo are all near and dear to my heart. Keep up the great work! It makes jobs for us designers so much easier! Excited for these new Unsplash features!
Solid update Mikael! Love how often you keep improving this free resource. I know Crew promote transparency (with Backstage blog etc.) but can't seem to find anything on Unsplash server costs since moving away from Tumblr? Can you please link me to the reference or share something on it. Unsplash must absolutely burn through bandwidth and it's fast too.
@hitdelete hey Rob, thanks for the love :)
Great question. I'm actually just working on a post where we share our server costs, so this is a perfect chance to share an early version of that. We're also going to be working over the next few months to open up all of our metrics that we track so that anyone can watch how Unsplash and the community around it grow in realtime.
On Tumblr we obviously weren't paying anything for the direct hosting of the website, but we were paying for the S3 hosting of the full-resolution photos. If I remember correctly, when we switched off of Tumblr (about a year and a half ago), we were paying around $500 USD a month.
When we switched from Tumblr to a custom setup, we were spending about 1000 USD each month — so it doubled in cost right away — but gave us a ton of flexibility to build features that wouldn't have been possible on Tumblr.
As Mikael said, we now serve over 600 million photo views and a few hundred million non-photo views per month via Imgix, and average about 10k requests per minute on our servers hosted on Heroku. Imgix costs about 8k USD and Heroku costs about 1500 USD ($1000 on web, ~$500 on services, background workers, and various micro-services). Both of them are amazing platforms that I can't recommend enough (don't let the high numbers fool you, the scale is what is costing us so much).
Let me know if you have any more questions!
@lukechesser great insight Luke, exactly what I was after, thank you. Look forward to the full post and real time metrics!
@lukechesser @hitdelete thanks for this awesome service. Been using it since the start!
One thing that I'm interested in. How are you covering the costs? In which ways do you plan on making money from it? If you don't mind me asking :)
@batteryless @hitdelete thanks Asbjørn :)
Right now the simple link at the top of Unsplash to Crew provides referrals to cover costs. @mikaelcho has written about it in the past here: http://blog.crew.co/how-side-pro...
@lukechesser @mikaelcho I can't believe I've never read this blogpost before. Love this clear written, awesome story of how Unsplash sprung into existence!
Unsplash is a great website, I use every week to my projects. I love nature photos and it's one of the best sources to get them (for free YAY!). Stay awesome. 😄✌
Great work, guys. I'm a huge fan of Unsplash. I'll definitely be signing up to take advantage of Collections and the other new features.
Hey everyone! I'm Mikael, one of the founders of Unsplash.
Today is one of the biggest days in our history.
Unsplash 4.0 is our most significant release ever. We focused on bringing more exposure to Unsplash contributors and helping you easily find the right photos to inspire your work.
Today, over 600 million photos a month are viewed on Unsplash and featured photos on Unsplash are seen more times than if they were published on the largest Instagram account, the front page of the New York Times, or the cover of Time Magazine.. By our research, Unsplash is one of the fastest growing photography sites ever.
For years, we looked up to the open movements that places like Wikipedia and Github created but the generosity of people to give something without expecting anything in return has surpassed our wildest imagination.
We're so grateful for the people who have given their work to support the work of others.
There are now 50,000+ photos on Unsplash. We wanted to give contributors more ways to have their work found while helping you find the right photos. And at the same time connecting the creative community on Unsplash in a whole new way.
We’re proud to announce today:
1. Unsplash Collections. You're the curator now: Create a collection of your favorite Unsplash photos, photos to use in your creative work, favorite desktop backgrounds, or simply save for later.
Your collection will appear alongside collections by fellow makers like, @khoi (Adobe), @photomatt (Wordpress), @guykawasaki (Canva), @pjrvs (Paul Jarvis), Jeffrey Zeldman (Happy Cog/A List Apart), @davemorin (Path), @brit (Brit Co), @mgsiegler (Google Ventures), Lawrence Lessig (Creator of Creative Commons), @dhh (Ruby on Rails), @chrismessina (Uber), @dannpetty (Medium), @andrewchen (Uber), and @om (True Ventures).
2. Unsplash Search. By keyword or location. 3M searchable tags created by the Unsplash community (that's real humans, not bots — to make sure search actually works :)
http://backstage.crew.co/unsplas...
3. Likes. Like a photo to show your love for the photo, save it for later/inspiration, or pull it into other services (3rd party apps, Dropbox, etc.).
http://backstage.crew.co/unsplas...
4. Unsplash API. Use the highest-quality free photos in your app/product. Currently powers 1,000+ apps including Craft by Invision (https://www.producthunt.com/tech...), Buffer (https://www.producthunt.com/tech...), Over (https://www.producthunt.com/tech...), and these Product Hunt products: https://www.producthunt.com/@mik...
We started Unsplash 3 years ago when we couldn't find a good photo for our website. Stock photos were either too expensive or cheesy. So we took our unused shots and gave them away for free. You could “do whatever you want.” No strings attached.
We never expected 3 years later, this little Tumblr blog with 10 photos would turn into a community of 40,000+ contributors.
This only happened because of you so thank you so much for the support. For being a part of the community. For contributing. It means so much to us to get the chance to work on a product like this. And be a part of this community. We can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done.
Mikael and the Unsplash team
@mikaelcho, @unsplash what an awesome update! The widespread adoption, and evolution of the Unsplash product, proves that putting the community first and building an ecosystem should still be top priority for any startup. Look forward to seeing what the future will bring for the Crew.
@mikaelcho I love this! Been using Unsplash since the very beginning and it's so cool seeing the product evolve in the right direction!
@mikaelcho Love this update! Collections will allow me keep images I might be able to use later in one place instead of saving them like a maniac to my hard drive :)
@mikaelcho Congrats to you and everyone at Crew! Happy to be part of the platform. 4.0 feels pretty solid. I use Unsplash on a daily basis to discover great photographers, find high quality photos to use as Mac wallpapers or just drop them in my mockups.
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