The Case Against Unsplash (2024)

There is something unmistakably tempting about a platform that promises to expose your photography to millions of people; after all, Unsplash is the de facto free stock photography site, embedded in countless apps that let you choose custom backgrounds or headers — Notion and Medium being prominent examples. All you have to do is upload one or more high quality images, add some descriptive tags, and refresh your stats page to watch the views and downloads mount up.

This happened to me a few years ago. After learning about Unsplash, I thought it would be neat to have my photography out there in the wild, gracing the desktops of average users or maybe even being used in a PowerPoint to make a pitch. I hadn’t yet given any serious thought to making money from my art photography — whether through licensing or prints — and I had created this romantic idea in my head that I was somehow “giving back to the photography community” by making some of my best images available for download by random people on the internet. Or perhaps that romantic idea was not my own, but rather clever advertising embedding itself in my subconscious…

In case you’re unaware, any photo you upload to Unsplash must be high resolution, can be downloaded by anyone on the internet, and may be used without meaningful restrictions. The only thing people aren’t allowed to do is represent your image as theirs. Aside from that, they can do what they want with it. Put it on a billboard? That’s kind of the idea. Completely mutilate it in Photoshop? No problem. Fail to credit you when using your image? Frowned upon, but not against the rules. Mutilate it in Photoshop and still credit you? That’s much worse than not being credited at all, and it happend to me. In fact, that’s what finally motivated me to delete my account. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Although they make it sound like a good business decision, Unsplash doesn’t actually promise anything if you post to it. All they do is appeal to your ego with phrases like:

“Showcase your talent. Don’t leave your images sitting on your hard drive.”

“Be part of the community by contributing your images.”

“Submit an image and watch your stats climb.”

It sounds beautiful, doesn’t it? Now let me bring you back to reality by examining each of these claims.

Showcase your talent

From the Unsplash website (emphasis added):

The photos on Unsplash are free to use and can be used for most commercial, personal projects, and for editorial use. You do not need to ask permission from or provide credit to the photographer or Unsplash, although it is appreciated when possible.

First of all, the people accessing your photos aren’t necessarily on the Unsplash website when doing so. They can be in their favorite app, type in a keyword or two in the search box, and the Unsplash API serves up random images whose tags line up with those keywords. They’ll see a picture they like and select it to be inserted into a document or presentation, or used as a header for their web page. Many of those apps don’t even bother to pull down the photographer’s name for credit (thankfully Medium does do this), so that wonderful stock image is often downloaded without the user ever learning who created it. And even if the user found your image through the Unsplash website and saw your name, they have no obligation to credit you in their final product. How exactly is this going to showcase anyone’s talent? Your guess is as good as mine.

Be part of the community

As I mentioned earlier, Unsplash had convinced me that there’s a community that I was somehow expected to give back to by contributing my images. But what is this community, exactly?

The closest definition of community I could find in the dictionary was this: “a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals,” or alternatively, “joint ownership or liability.” But nowhere in Unsplash’s terms and conditions, nor in its execution, could I discern anything resembling that type of community. The people downloading your photos are by and large not photographers — whatever content they’re creating, it’s not photography, otherwise they wouldn’t need to download yours. Sure, I’ve downloaded the occasional image from Unsplash, so I guess I do share some interests with other users. But a community suggests a group of people who support each other, who communicate with each other, who have some sense of shared identity. Unsplash is nothing of the sort.

As awful a platform as Instagram is from a technical viewpoint — have you ever tried posting a photo with 3:2 aspect ratio in portrait orientation? — it is a space where photographers can exhibit their works and get to know and follow other photographers who inspire them. That, at least on a rudimentary level, represents a community. But having one group of people create professional images, and having another group of people consume those images for use in basically anything without even having to credit the photographer, is not community; it’s exploitation.

But let’s take Unsplash’s idea of community at face value for a moment. Who is downloading these images? Certainly it includes any number of poor schlubs who just want to put together a quick PowerPoint or website to pitch their business, and who have no budget for stock photography. If the Unsplash license were somehow limited to people who can’t otherwise afford it, along with some other commonsense restrictions — heck, I’d support that. But this “community” also includes large corporations who can certainly afford to pay for a stock photography license. And they likely would, unless they can find something that will do the trick for free. This leads us to the ironic observation that, if I consider my community the photography community, I’m actually hurting it by posting to Unsplash. How? Even if I’m not interested in making money from licensing myself, by donating free stock photography for anyone to download and use, I’m offering a no-cost alternative to someone else’s — possibly even better — photography for a fee. In other words, I’m taking food out of the mouth of other photographers. Not cool.

Watch your stats climb

This part is true. It didn’t take long at all for the Unplash algorithm to serve up my images. I had a series of fireworks photos that was phenomenally popular, reaching millions of views in a short time, and in a few cases racking up hundreds of thousands of downloads. My first reaction was excitement fueled by pride — people really loved my photos! (Cue video of Sally Field at the Oscars.) And actually, those photos were a pretty good fit for Unsplash since I didn’t have any particular attachment to them; they were just pictures of a fireworks show I’d taken years earlier and while they were technically well executed, there was nothing especially artistic about them.

But other photos, some of which I really did have a strong attachment to, also started being downloaded, albeit in smaller numbers. And I started to get a little bit worried, because once someone downloads your image from Unsplash they have a virtually unlimited, perpetual license to use that image, even if you later take it down. The number of downloads shown for each picture is an accurate representation of how many such licenses are floating around out there, with no possibility of ever revoking them. Instead of creating excitement, the rising number of downloads became a source of dread. I started asking myself some questions:

• How would having a particular image on Unsplash affect my ability to sell prints of that image, considering that people could simply download a high resolution JPEG, upload it to a printing service and have them make a large print of it to hang on their wall without me making a penny?
• Do I want to eventually license some of these photos for a fee? If so, I cannot simultaneously make them available on Unsplash.
• What about photos that show even a single download? I will never be able to sell an exclusive license for those, because they’ve already been downloaded at least once under an explicitly non-exclusive license.
• What would keep someone from making “fair use” alterations to one of my favorite photos and then selling them? (Yes, this is permitted under the Unsplash terms and conditions, which state that users may not “[s]ell copies of Photos without first significantly or meaningfully updating, modifying, or otherwise incorporating new creative elements into the Photos beyond simple retouches, resizing, or other minimal changes so long as they are not done by automated means (i.e., selling unaltered, slightly altered, or altered by automatic script copies of the Photos), including selling them as prints or printed on physical goods.”)

It was this latter scenario that I was most concerned about, and although I don’t think anyone actually sold my work after altering it, I received a rude wake-up call when I got tagged in a post by someone who had taken one of my photos, manipulated — nay, mutilated — it with a filter, and subsequently posted it on Instagram. (Actually, this wasn’t even “fair use” under copyright law; they basically just turned it into an extremely flat, extremely grainy black and white photo, but good luck going after someone for that.) To make things worse, they apparently thought they were doing me a favor by giving me image credit, but considering the end result I really wish they hadn’t. It was nothing embarrassing, it just looked like an edit gone bad, and I didn’t want to be associated with it. My visceral reaction to it, more than the actual “offense,” convinced me that perhaps Unsplash wasn’t for me. Not long thereafter I decided to close my account.

Clearly there are plenty of photographers who have no qualms about posting on Unsplash, and lots of people are thankful to them for generously providing high quality stock photography at no cost. Far be it from me to say that no one should use this and similar services, because there is obviously a need, and I guess if you’re primarily a stock photographer, it can be a way to get your name out there. However, fine art photographers who value their work and plan someday to make money from prints and/or licensing may want to think carefully about what they get themselves into.

As for me, I’ll never be able to claw back the image licenses I’ve given out by posting them on Unsplash. Fortunately the total number of images I shared was fairly limited — perhaps a few dozen — and aside from the fireworks photos, most had download numbers in the single or low double digits. I can’t tell you whether or not you should post on Unsplash, 500px (another problematic service in my opinion) or similar sites. All I can do is implore my fellow photographers to value their work for what it’s worth and not give things away willy-nilly, especially if doing so is irreversible.