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Unsplash is being acquired by Getty Images

567 points by baptlac 6y ago

psing 6y ago
Good for the Unsplash team. I've used their images on a bunch of my content. It's a great resource!
maaarghk 6y ago
Somewhat reminds me of Facebook and Whatsapp
- abhiminator 6y ago
  Absolutely. Came here to say this. Remember back in 2014 when Mark Zuckerberg promised that WhatsApp will function as a standalone app, completely sandboxed from the rest of the Facebook ecosystem? That didn't happen, did it?
EMM_386 6y ago
> After interacting with the team at Getty Images more and better understanding their long-term vision, we realized we shared so much alignment that going at this together could be much more impactful than going at it separately. Of course they will say that now, but isn't Unsplash a direct threat to Getty's bottom line? Unsplash images are free for commercial and non-commercial purposes with no permission needed. The only limitation is that you can't sell them or start a competing service. How long before this changes?
- achow 6y ago
  Absolutely. This is a dark day for 'open source' images.
  - projectileboy 6y ago
    It’s hard to find examples of acquisitions that were good for the customers or the employees.
    - xzcvczx 6y ago
      in general i would agree, but i think that github might be one exception, the free plan was expanded to include private repo's, the redesign is annoying but usable they have made some mistakes with things like the dmca notice on youtube-dl but thankfully restored it and seem to be willing to help fight for it
- dhimes 6y ago
  I with you here. I love Unsplash- but I'm afraid it's doomed now.
- endantwit 6y ago
  (Almost every website that features free images already also shows ads from websites like Getty Images and iStockphoto.) I can also see it happen that Unsplash remains free forever, but that it will be used to lead more people to Getty Images. And that's very understandable from a Getty Images point of view, right?
  - weego 6y ago
    My guess would be that unsplash will start adding source file size limits (that can unlocked with a Getty account) and long term quality and quantity will stagnate as its used as an acquisition funnel for their paid services
  - ludamad 6y ago
    The nervous thing is that it would need to constantly defend its ROI to survive
- dbrgn 6y ago
  I recently started uploading pictures to Unsplash. I'm not sure I'll continue with that.
  - dazc 6y ago
    Won't be long before they are Getty's images and not yours - or maybe I'm cynical?
- dazc 6y ago
  'How long before this changes?' I'd guess it will be a gradual process that starts with a constant nag that you can find more and better images if only you hand over your card details. Ultimately, it will be just another Getty brand.
- james-bcn 6y ago
  Yep. I used to love istockphoto before Getty purchased it and slowly eliminated it. The same will happen to Unsplash.
- petercooper 6y ago
  Unsplash images are free for commercial and non-commercial purposes with no permission needed. The only limitation is that you can't sell them or start a competing service. My theory is Getty is really paying for the right to sell them. Getty has a lot of very large customers who pay for access to their libraries and adding a new substantial library to their plans could benefit them. I'm thinking it's a bit like when AWS takes something like MongoDB and rolls out DocumentDB.. there are companies who are so entrenched with their AWS accounts that it seems more appealing than dealing with the hassle of opening a separate account and doing all 'the legal' for another service, even if it's free/cheaper. If a large agency or institution has a process around Getty and the way they assign rights and manage licenses, maybe they'll happily pay for the Unsplash library from Getty even if they could get it free separately(?)
chinathrow 6y ago
I recently discovered Pexels for anyone looking for other sources after this. https://www.pexels.com https://www.pexels.com
- jiofih 6y ago
  Tons of portraits in there, but I see no mention of signed releases?
- yborg 6y ago
  Very slick, and fast. But how do they pay for the site? There are no ads and no monetization I could find. The claim 4 billion image views a month, that has to cost them some bandwidth...
  - dannyw 6y ago
    (I work for Canva). Pexels has affiliate ads (to paid stock sites) in specific locations; as an example, when your search returns zero Pexels results. Pexels content is also syndicated to Canva, where it is free to use (under the same license) by several hundred million users. This helps us provide a better Canva user experience, while giving more exposure to work on Pexels.
    - yborg 6y ago
      Ah. And Pexels is in fact owned by Canva, as is Pixabay. (What is it with Germany and picture-sharing sites?)
rvz 6y ago
A big day for the VCs. For everyone else using unsplash, get ready for a giant price hike.
css 6y ago
I was a contributor [0] to their second batch of photos (the first with user-generated content) when they initially launched under the name Ooomf because I love the philosophy of open-source. They even published an open-source photography book [1], which I was featured in [2]. It is very cool to stumble across my images across the web. The initial model was to receive a handful of user-generated photos, then handpick 10 each week and feature them [3]. I don't even see this feature page anymore. However, we all know that once you sell, you lose control of the product. While on day one the service will still exist, I doubt it will be around with its current philosophy for much longer, especially since Getty has already stolen all my images from 500px that do not have people (so they can sell them without releases). [0]: https://unsplash.com/@css https://unsplash.com/@css [1]: https://book.unsplash.com/ https://book.unsplash.com/ [2]: https://unsplash.com/photos/bSmKli4OTIY https://unsplash.com/photos/bSmKli4OTIY [3]: https://unsplash.com/collections/5/collection-%235%3A-crew https://unsplash.com/collections/5/collection-%235%3A-crew
- liveoneggs 6y ago
  what were the license terms of the upload?
  - css 6y ago
    https://unsplash.com/license https://unsplash.com/license
    - liveoneggs 6y ago
      That is the license for downloading but does not specify what happens on uploading -- it appears photos uploaded to unsplash were given to unsplash, relinquishing all rights. The commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) would have retained ownership.
      - css 6y ago
        > it appears photos uploaded to unsplash were given to unsplash This is incorrect, according to section 6 of https://unsplash.com/terms https://unsplash.com/terms
rchowe 6y ago
Unsplash has a great product, however for Getty this seems to be a good deal more because they eliminate a competitor than because they acquire a good product/team. I read that Unsplash's plan to monetize was to sell banner ads and branded image placement, but that's gotta make less money than Getty slapping their normal business model onto Unsplash, right?
jiofih 6y ago
> this is not one of those acquisitions > will continue to operate as a stand-alone business Sounds funny after you read the exact same words for the 17th time!
- toyg 6y ago
  OurIncredibleJourney.jpg
- kalleboo 6y ago
  https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com
sarabad2021 6y ago
RIP. I'm sure this acquisition will be great for the team but it's pretty obvious Getty will fill the site with tricky sponsored images. They will also likely start fading out new free images until the site is mostly stale or filled with sponsored image links. I could also see them playing around with image licensing so it's less obvious how you can use them. Welp, I guess there's always Pexels.
- weird-eye-issue 6y ago
  "it's pretty obvious Getty will fill the site with tricky sponsored images" That is literally Unsplash's current business model already
- busymom0 6y ago
  They already have tricky sponsored images on their site. Also their "Brands" ads: https://unsplash.com/brands https://unsplash.com/brands
asicsp 6y ago
>Unsplash will continue to operate as a standalone brand I hope this means that their current free offerings will continue. https://www.pexels.com/ https://www.pexels.com/ also offers similar free collections.
- brtkdotse 6y ago
  Also https://pixabay.com https://pixabay.com.
  - ncphil 6y ago
    +1 that.
machawinka 6y ago
Getty Images is the same old crony capitalism at its worse. Sad day for the Internet. RIP.
- blunte 6y ago
  Fortunately there are a lot of people who travel, and modern phones take remarkably good photos easily. The biggest immediate impact the "photographer" has is on framing the shot; but with high res images and you being willing to crop, you can do half of that job yourself. So there should be another to replace Unsplash. And if the founders can guess on being acquired in a few years, then this isn't a bad plan.
masona 6y ago
Getty already offers free images through embeddable content as well as brand partnerships, so it's natural for them to want a fresh injection of great work. Especially since their library has been rather stale for so long. It's hard to keep nice pictures coming in when photographers are getting royalty statements of only pennies. Of course, that's still more than Unsplash photographers receive. It will be interesting to see how Getty leverages this new model of 'images as ad network.' The Unsplash dashboard features the number of image views/downloads very prominently and artists treat it as a kind of cachet. An image with 100,000 views at $2.00 CPM is what, $200? It's strange to me that photographers brag about their view counts when it's plain evidence of how much the company is making off their shadow labor. Credit to the Unsplash team for taking this dissonance to its apex - it really did require a new way of viewing images as assets that hadn't exist before. I'm hopeful that they can bring that kind of thinking to Getty. I'm not that hopeful that any photographer benefits from this new partnership.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
voisin 6y ago
I am unclear why Getty Images would be interested, unless the purchase price was less than the cost of internally building its own loss leader open source image site that allows them to try to upsell to “premium” photos. Users have limited loyalty to any particular source of “free”. Getty presumably has a far larger library from which to pull images, so there can’t be any advantage to Unsplash’s library. I am guessing it was a very low purchase price.
- petercooper 6y ago
  This article from 2019 might provide some clues: https://www.chron.com/business/texas-inc/article/Getty-Images-struggles-to-frame-a-profitable-14901397.php https://www.chron.com/business/texas-inc/article/Getty-Image... It seems that one of Getty's biggest problems is that the variety of fresh imagery their customers expect Getty to have to hand has shot up while revenues have grown more modestly. Maybe Unsplash's library and base of contributors will actually provide some value in the long tail for their existing customers.. and it might be possible for them to offer that extended library to customers with existing packages without them really caring where it came from or that they could get it cheaper elsewhere.
toyg 6y ago
Pretty inevitable, it was actually surprising how long it lasted. Somebody gotta pay for that bandwidth.
RicoElectrico 6y ago
I could imagine tightening collaboration with Getty which could make sense, but once you let somebody acquire you, the game is over. No promise can hold. Can someone link me a list acquisition promises that new owners of various businesses broke in the past? There must be one.
- momothereal 6y ago
  The WhatsApp acquisition comes to mind: 1. Promise to not hoard and sell user data: https://blog.whatsapp.com/why-we-don-t-sell-ads https://blog.whatsapp.com/why-we-don-t-sell-ads 2. Get acquired by arguably the largest ad network and data hoarding giant 3. Proceed to flow user data to FB, forcing it down the throat of all their users
- jamix 6y ago
  https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
leowinterde 6y ago
RIP. Time to leave unsplash
- blunte 6y ago
  You won't have to leave them, as within a year there will be nothing recognizable to leave. It will have been replaced with free content wrapped in a bow and pricetag, or simply the best free content redirecting to similar paid content.
robinhood 6y ago
Good for Unsplash, sad for the community.
kirillzubovsky 6y ago
If you still want to upload your awesome shots to a community that might use them for their projects, I highly recommend Creative Market (https://creativemarket.com/kirill https://creativemarket.com/kirill). Started uploading photos there a few years ago, and I still get a payment every few months. You don’t have to charge a lot for your photos, but this way it’s something to keep you/site going, while also sharing what you have with the world.
anshumankmr 6y ago
I have been browsing Unsplash for five or six years now. I remember the time when it did not have ads to the how it is now. I understand the owner might not have been earning a lot from the site, so I get that he wanted to cash out. I just hope that the content remains of high quality and open source if possible.
JackPoach 6y ago
They can't change licensing for images that are already in use under Unsplash current agreement, can they?
- blunte 6y ago
  Whether they can or not is less relevant. Getty has already demonstrated that it is willing to sell free works to people who don't realize they can get it for free (legally). I'm not even talking about where they take other people's works and illegally resell it as their own... Getty, if judged by their past behaviors, is an evil company.
  - dpwm 6y ago
    > Getty has already demonstrated that it is willing to sell free works to people who don't realize they can get it for free (legally). It seems plausible to me that there are some customers whose legal teams would be very uneasy about anything free. For those customers, Getty’s name and “reputability” may be the service they are paying for.
    - ziddoap 6y ago
      Assuming appropriate licensing, I have no idea why a legal team would be uneasy about using something free. Can you elaborate?
      - dpwm 6y ago
        > Assuming appropriate licensing For such customers the mere fact it is free would make the licensing questionable. Consider a service like unsplash: what vetting can there be that the people who upload actually hold the copyright? Do unsplash indemnify you if it turns out they never had permission? How does it look in a court, should it come to that? It’s not about paying money for the image as much as it’s about buying an assurance – even if it is only to be able to say "we acted in good faith and licensed this from a ‘reputable’ supplier.” Some legal teams are incredibly risk averse. Unsplash almost certainly isn’t considered by these sorts of customers. It’s not some kind of snobbery, it’s to avoid having to deal with the case where the one image that you build a multi-million dollar ad campaign on turns out not to have been improperly licensed.
MikeTaylor 6y ago
Has anyone made a complete archive of Unsplash, so that at least when Getty shut it down ("in order to serve customers metter by focusing on our core business") the images that have already been uploaded there will remain available?
- HajiraSifre 6y ago
  I think The Eye did archive it at some point. Also, it might be hard to find a scraper, since Unsplash likes (or at least liked) sending "friendly" requests to authors of scrapers on GitHub to remove their repos.
- xd1936 6y ago
  Excellent idea. I'd be curious to see what the current compressed database size is... Their (wonderful and brief) license does prohibits "the right to compile photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service", so this would have to be a personal archive.
beshrkayali 6y ago
Well, I'm deleting my stuff from there.
- sarabad2021 6y ago
  Interesting, I wonder how many other photographers will delete their photos. I'm curious, can you and will you be uploading them elsewhere?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mwambua 6y ago
    I'm no expert on this, but I believe their license implies that you can upload your photos elsewhere: https://unsplash.com/license https://unsplash.com/license However, deleting your photos does not prevent other people from using them in the future.
- mwambua 6y ago
  +1 Though I'm a little worried that the photos will end up there again... because of the permissive license.
question000 6y ago
If the automobile was invented today it would be owned by the largest conglomeration of horse breeders.
- devoutsalsa 6y ago
  And you'd start it by sticking your hand out of the window and slapping the side with your buggy whip.
- DVk6dqsfyx5i3ii 6y ago
  Henry Ford had to fight what was essentially a patent troll when he started his motor company. https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/11/05/the-original-patent-troll.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/11/05/the-origin...
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  I remember reading that at the beginning,there was a requirement for a person to walk ahead of an automobile and alert others that it's coming. It was related to horse industry lobbying too.
  - KineticLensman 6y ago
    > there was a requirement for a person to walk ahead of an automobile Yes. In the UK this requirement lasted until 1896 when it was removed by an act of Parliament [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotives_on_Highways_Act_1896 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotives_on_Highways_Act_18...
    - yesenadam 6y ago
      The 1865 "Red Flag Act" "required all road locomotives, which included automobiles, to travel at a maximum of 4 mph (6.4 km/h) in the country and 2 mph (3.2 km/h) in the city, as well as requiring a man carrying a red flag to walk in front of road vehicles hauling multiple wagons. The 1896 Act removed some restrictions of the 1865 act and raised the speed to 14 mph (23 km/h). " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts
MikeTaylor 6y ago
I have to say this kind of announcement sticks in the craw. I get that Mikael Cho and colleagues created Unsplash and it's theirs to do with as they please: they don't owe us anything. But really, couldn't they just come right out and say "They offered us too much money, we couldn't resist, So long, suckers"?
- blunte 6y ago
  nobody needs to say that anymore; it is a given. if you sell your company to a Getty or Facebook or Zoom, for example, you really were just selling your customers and eliminating yourself as competition, for probably a nice payoff. if you had a bad VC deal, then you the founders/builders might even get nothing.
- csbartus 6y ago
  I remember the day Crew.co (another Mikael Cho venture) was sold to Dribbble. I was a member of, and I've felt cheated. I was sold and paid nothing. I've contributed to the value of Crew.co and I was ousted from a day to another. The official reason selling Crew was to focus on Unsplash. Another venture where network effects (free work done by contributors) can generate later a fortune for few. So ... we've been tricked. Our collective efforts was monetized by a few. That's network economy.
danso 6y ago
Loved reading about their journey on HN. Here's a 5-year-old thread about their costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11519085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11519085 Unfortunately the original link is down (and I could not find an archived version). But here's relevant material from the comments: > $18k is a lot of money to spend each month. Understanding the scale of Unsplash though can help explain the costs. > So at a cost of $18k per month you are getting 30M pages served, 140M API calls, 2.2M background jobs and 143TB of bandwidth. That sounds like a lot of bang for your buck. > The biggest chunk is the bandwidth charges from imgix. They do appear to be giving you a break on their published pricing, but not a huge one ($0.075/GB vs $0.08/GB). The CDN they are using appears to be Fastly, which also has a published price of $0.08/GB. So, there doesn't appear to be any overzealous markup on imgix's part.
- llacb47 6y ago
  https://archive.fo/iZyRK https://archive.fo/iZyRK
- exikyut 6y ago
  Nice news: the link in that HN article goes to backstage.crew.co, which was 302ing to dribbble.com. And while IA didn't save a copy of the dribbble page... ...it did save copies of the original links before they started 302ing. In fact, it saved across two different site reorganizations, https://web.archive.org/web/20160504110408/http://backstage.crew.co/what-does-unsplash-cost/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160504110408/http://backstage.... (backstage.crew.co) https://web.archive.org/web/20160903203745/https://crew.co/backstage/dispatch/what-does-unsplash-cost/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160903203745/https://crew.co/b... (crew.co/backstage) Both pages are fully intact; I think the theme on the 2nd one is a bit nicer. (This feels like a bit of a "1st-world-problems" discussion, making commentary about the most aesthetically pleasing presentation of obscurely archived webpages that've officially fallen off the internet.)
- Aeolun 6y ago
  I don’t mean to rain on their parade, but 30M requests served per month, while sounding really good, translates to 11 requests per second. And maybe 60 requests per second for their 140M API requests. If I were paying $2500 per month for that I’d be a bit sad.
jehb 6y ago
I'm going to instead see this as an opportunity for something better to emerge. My biggest problem with Unsplash is that they did not use a standard license that would easily be compatible with a Creative Commons or open source licensed work. If I incorporated images from Unsplash, suddenly I couldn't say "you're welcome to do whatever you like with my work." In fact, they used to use a CC0 license, but then changed, because other sites were copying them. As a user, this was a feature, not a bug. I would far prefer to see the community band together and produce an image sharing website with CC0 as the default license. Creative Commons image search right now is in need of some TLC from an engaged community.
- onli 6y ago
  Creative Commons caused many issues in countries like Germany, with photographers publishing under CC with attribution clause, then hunting for sites using photos without or with not 100% correct attribution (in illegal pro-profit cooperations with lawyers) and suing the site owners for thousands of dollars. It really would have to be CC0, but even mentioning CC will raise a red flag for many now.
  - woah 6y ago
    What was illegal about what they were doing?
    - onli 6y ago
      The shared for-profit part of the scheme. It's one thing to hire a lawyer to get a license respected, it's another to institute to what amounts to a fraud scheme: Publish images with as hidden license requirements as possible, "hire" a lawyer for free with a profit sharing agreement, then sue who you can. That profit sharing agreement is illegal here, but hard to prove, and the Abmahnindustrie is actively protected by politicians (many of which are lawyers, pure coincidence of course). Edit: When they send in that notice (die Abmahnung) they will ask for money for incurred costs. Since they did not pay anything in advance - the lawyer worked for free - there were no costs. That's not legal here.
rPlayer6554 6y ago
Noooooo..... good-bye to Unsplash being a good site. Maybe it's just not a sustainable site, but I'm certainly sad to see it go.
krm01 6y ago
Very curious :Any info on what there revenue was? From what I've read/seen they were experimenting with a bunch of methods, but nothing seemed to really work (could be wrong). How much did they get acquired for?
preommr 6y ago
Potentially unpopular opinion: Good. I am tired of people just putting large images into their websites where the main image is barely relevant to the rest of the page. It was sloppy and lazy, like modern day clip art. And if someone really wants images, there are paid services like envato that are at least somewhat sustainable. These solutions are really affordable now and they've got very decent licensing terms.
- rriepe 6y ago
  It's always been weird to me that people are so averse to adding an extra 20kb of CSS, but they'll drop megabytes and megabytes of javascript and images into their site.
- seanosaur 6y ago
  > And if someone really wants images, there are paid services like envato that are at least somewhat sustainable. These solutions are really affordable now and they've got very decent licensing terms. Or, more likely, they'll just revert back to rips from Google Images. Maybe that's just the cynic in me, though.
- rchaud 6y ago
  This acquisition isn't going to change that. Getty isn't going to slap a watermark on every Unsplash image overnight. And even if they do, people will continue using meaningless images as thumbnails for their Medium posts from some other source like Pexels.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  You prefer walls of text, with nothing else?
  - dingaling 6y ago
    Invert the scenario: imagine a blog post with photos by the author, but text pasted in from Wikipedia just to space the photos out a bit. It's essentially the same thing.
dudeinjapan 6y ago
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. -- Robert Frost
ncphil 6y ago
A very sad beginning of the end, but even more sadly, predictable. Rampant cannibalism from the top down. Will it ever stop?
dbrgn 6y ago
This reminds me of 500px. I used to be a huge fan of 500px. It was the most beautiful photography site on the internet, designed with attention to every tiny detail. It allowed you to share your photos under a CC license, presented them beautifully and had fantastic curated feeds with photos by fantastic photographers. In 2018 they were acquired by an investor company and partnered exclusively with Getty. As a contributor, you were now pushed to "earn money with your pictures", CC licenses were discouraged and (I think) eventually removed. The site stopped getting optimized for aesthetics, it was now getting optimized for selling stock photos. I deleted all my photos and left. I hope this doesn't happen to Unsplash. But I'm not optimistic.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Oh man, 500px used to be amazing. The photos were just beautiful. As you say, it died at some point (the quality started declining and they pushed some user-hostile stuff) and I never went back.
- teryyy 6y ago
  https://www.pexels.com/ https://www.pexels.com/ is another similar site, owned by Canva which seems to have kept its quality through the years.
  - minxomat 6y ago
    Pexels is the best community for people who want to share their photos/videos (CC0). It's the worst community for monetising that in any way.
    - dbrgn 6y ago
      > It's the worst community for monetising that in any way. That sounds fantastic, I'll take a look! Edit: It's not CC0 though, right? The Pexels License looks similar to the Unsplash License.
      - dannyw 6y ago
josefresco 6y ago
I've lived/worked through Getty's purchase and destruction of iStock. I'm not eager to watch Unsplash suffer the same fate. RIP to another great service.
haxiomic 6y ago
My main association with Getty is their 'copyfraud' practises where they claim public domain images (NASA, Library of Congress etc) as their own and sell licenses[0]. They're also well known for aggressive acquisitions[1]. Perhaps this a good time to create a mirror [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Claiming_copyright_over_public_domain_content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Claiming_copyrigh... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Acquisitions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Acquisitions
- ud_0 6y ago
  Based on this behavior, my paranoid side is expecting a wave of copyright notices and invoices being sent to every single site that is using Unsplash images right now.
  - dhimes 6y ago
    Hopefully they won't be able to revoke rights already given...
    - z77dj3kl 6y ago
      They can't, but they can attempt copyfraud as they seem to already be doing, see the aforementioned wiki article and public domain NASA/LoC images.
- mfsch 6y ago
  Careful about creating mirrors, the Unsplash license [1] explicitly disallows “compiling photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service”. [1]: https://unsplash.com/license https://unsplash.com/license
  - haxiomic 6y ago
    Indeed, if you're putting something up online you probably just want to make it easy for users to switch rather than reuploading Offline personal archives and tools to create them I expect are permissible (IANAL)
bb101 6y ago
MySQL and Oracle all over again. Perhaps time to fork Unsplash and give birth to the MariaDB of open photography?
23B1 6y ago
"This is not one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down. Unsplash will continue to operate as a standalone brand and division of Getty Images." Sweet summer child
- zucker42 6y ago
  What is it about being the CEO of a startup that causes people to believe these promises?
  - mritchie712 6y ago
    Everyone thinks “this time will be different”
    - dhimes 6y ago
      Indeed. The abused spouse syndrome. Although that's probably a more apt name for when you believe the same company for the nth time.
    - dekerta 6y ago
      I think it's more so something founders can tell themselves to feel better about the situation. Deep down they know it's not true
  - IshKebab 6y ago
    What makes you think they believe it?
    - zucker42 6y ago
      For example, I honestly believe the Oculus founder believed the promises that you wouldn't ever need to use a FB account to use an Oculus, just given his public comments.
      - twentydollars 6y ago
ElFitz 6y ago
> Unsplash will continue to operate as a standalone brand and division of Getty Images. The entire Unsplash team will be staying and building Unsplash in the direction we have been. The main difference now is we have access to the resources and experience of Getty Images to help accelerate our plans to create the world’s most useful visual asset library. Sounds so familiar. How many times have we heard this one? How many times has it remained true in the long run?
- dormento 6y ago
  Just to save calories in case someone actually spends non-zero time thinking about this: it is never true. Its a "put 2 and 2 together" type thing. - Getty is a for-profit organization. - Profit means money. - Getty is lawsuit-happy. Now it is only a matter of time before Unsplash is "incredible journey'd".
  - dhimes 6y ago
    We need an office pool for the timeline.
  - lupire 6y ago
    Unsplash makes money too, and is lawsuit-compatible.
- pnt12 6y ago
  Almost never. The current exception nowadays seems to be Microsoft. Minecraft, npm, github seem to be doing good, and keeping their core values and strengths.
- Qub3d 6y ago
  For a historical record, see https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
corytheboyd 6y ago
Apologies if it’s super obvious to the rest of the people here, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what Unsplash offers? It’s not at all clear from the website, at least to me. Not intended as an attack, more as a PSA to make your purpose extremely obvious for the dumb people like me :)
- shdon 6y ago
  They launched in 2013 as a website for high quality copyright- and royalty-free images. The license has changed a few times, which is unfortunate. There is a bit more on their "about" page (which is hidden in the three-dots-menu) at https://unsplash.com/about https://unsplash.com/about
  - corytheboyd 6y ago
    Ooooh that’s why I couldn’t find it, thanks!
subpixel 6y ago
What ever happened to their association with OST and micro crypto payments?
- hobofan 6y ago
  AFAIK OST is no more, and the company behind them pivoted to make an online fitness course portal[0]. I think there are some projects that were building things using their OpenST framework and continue to use that. [0]https://moxie.xyz/ https://moxie.xyz/
apercu 6y ago
Because of course it is.
cpach 6y ago
”Intellectual property is the oil of the 21 century. Look at the richest men a hundred years ago; they all made their money extracting natural resources or moving them around. All today’s richest men have made their money out of intellectual property.“ –Mark Getty, founder of Getty Images https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Getty https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Getty
- lioeters 6y ago
  Ugh, what a clueless analogy, blind to its own obsolescence and polluting effect on society.
  - caslon 6y ago
    It's actually a perfect and terribly perceptive analogy. He's right! Like Rockefeller and Carnegie and his grandfather before him, he's made a load of money and made the world a worse place while doing it, all the while not even attempting to contribute anything to society. He doesn't claim to be a good man, he claims to be a rich man.
- qznc 6y ago
  My manager, who is American, once made a comparison that completely blew my mind: we laugh at native Americans handing over their land without really understanding that they're getting screwed in the transaction, and yet we just hand over our personal data to Google and Facebook without a second thought. We barely even have a concept of data ownership. –u/henrebotha https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/kd0s5c/dont_rely_on_a_single_company_for_all_your/gfuq9ex/ https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/kd0s5c/dont_rel...
kmclean 6y ago
> This is not one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down. I’ll believe it when I see it. I didn’t know there was any other kind of tech acquisition.
swyx 6y ago
does anyone have any guesstimates about their business side of things? i know they raised a series A focused on crypto (https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/15/unsplash-simple-token-series-a/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/15/unsplash-simple-token-seri...) but ironically they seem to have completely missed out on this NFT wave. serving up that many images every day is costly. im guessing they ran out of money.
- shayanbahal 6y ago
  That is a pretty interesting point. They could have gained more credit ($$$) and media attention from integrating NFT minting functionality for their huge user base.
polyrand 6y ago
They also did a FAQs page about it: https://help.unsplash.com/en/articles/5097983-unsplash-getty-images-faq https://help.unsplash.com/en/articles/5097983-unsplash-getty...
- latexr 6y ago
  Saving that to the Internet Archive[1]. Let’s revisit in a few years. [1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210330134914/https://help.unsplash.com/en/articles/5097983-unsplash-getty-images-faq http://web.archive.org/web/20210330134914/https://help.unspl...
Aeolun 6y ago
> This is not one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down. Translation: This is one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down. I wonder if it sounds as ridiculous to the one writing it as it does to someone reading.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
solmag 6y ago
It's going to turn out bad. Great site for now.
damsta 6y ago
We knew it would happen and with the bills they had to pay each month I understand the decision. I just wish Unsplash will not become another item on a list of services Getty killed/made worse.
yeswecatan 6y ago
What makes Unsplash so special? I've browsed it in the past and yea, it has some really nice pictures. Why would artists post their work (for free) there instead of another site?
- lovegoblin 6y ago
  Why do people contribute to open source?
  - yeswecatan 6y ago
    Ok, so there isn't necessarily some secret sauce with Unsplash. If it all goes south after the acquisition, there's opportunity for a new one.
ArchUser2255 6y ago
RIP Unsplash
amelius 6y ago
Does anybody have a torrent of their free content before it is too late?
appleflaxen 6y ago
This is terrible news for end users.
munificent 6y ago
I was wondering what Unsplash's business model was, and I stumbled onto [1]: > Nor is it going to slap banner ads on every page of its website. Yes, it’s unveiling a digital advertising business, but Unsplash is taking a specific approach — working with companies to create branded photos, which will then appear on desirable searches. > Square, for example, could upload photos of the Square Register, which will then show up when Unsplash users search for “cash register” and other terms. > Brands working with Unsplash will get prominent placement in relevant searches, as well as their own brand channel, but Cho said the real impact only begins on the Unsplash website. So basically, without you realizing it, you may end up with paid product placement in your presentations and (pointless) header images on your Medium articles. Sometimes I wonder of the answer to the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter is: eventually all alien civilizations end up converting their entire society and economy into advertising monetization, all corporations consolidate into one giant inert behemoth, all real progress stops, and the species converts its entire planet into fuel for AdCoin cryptomining and winks out of existence. I miss the days where people just, like, started businesses that charged people for stuff, and people bought that stuff, and the business stayed in business without having to be acquired or snuffed out by a megacorp. [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/10/unsplash-for-brands/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/10/unsplash-for-brands/
- Igelau 6y ago
  This was no mystery. I'm pretty sure I saw a giant photo of a Coke bottle on Unsplash not that long ago. It has plenty of corporate users, and not in some secret shill sense, in a "This post from Docusign" kind of way.
- daxterspeed 6y ago
  The whole brands aspect has really confused me. If you search for "nature" on unsplash right now the first result is a picture of a person prominently holding a product in the most blatant product placement way possible. So far they're basically working as banner ads, no sensible user would ever want to use a sponsored photo for their work. I'm more afraid of how they'll modify their existing products to manipulate users into paying for "Premium" Getty stock photos over the free Unsplash ones :/
IceWreck 6y ago
They cant change the license of existing stuff right ? RIP.
leetrout 6y ago
I wish they’d been bought by smugmug instead.
xNeil 6y ago
I just use https://search.creativecommons.org https://search.creativecommons.org. Any photo I want/need is available, and I already clearly know the license. Unsplash etc. are good, but this is solid.
skeeter2020 6y ago
>> ... I’m excited about this acquisition ... because it’s not goodbye, it’s about acceleration >> This is not one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down. Unsplash will continue to operate as a standalone brand and division of Getty Images. >> Will Unsplash remain an independent brand? Yes. HAHA! You can't intentionally write parody this good! Just like every teenager swears they'll be nothing like their parents, every acquired startup swears nothing will change and their independence is preserved; why did you make a massive change to keep everything the same? Do you think Getty wants something for those bags of money they just handed you? I'm not against acquisitions, on the contrary. I just expect everyone, including the author, to acknowledge that this sort of post is solely to allay their conscience, not that of staff or customers. Funny enough the same hubris is probably what aided their success in the first place...
- Igelau 6y ago
  No one actually thinks that. Mad Libs Press Releases just has that wording baked in.
cvaidya1986 6y ago
Congratulations to the unsplash team!!
sneak 6y ago
Quick, pull the non-rate-limited API keys out of the unsplash desktop app with strings and start mirroring it from Tor (which they don't block). The images are public domain.
- lovegoblin 6y ago
  > The images are public domain. They are permissively licensed, but the photographers still own the copyrights. They are not public domain.
  - sneak 6y ago
    Ahh, you're right of course. I forgot about that. I believe the permissive license allows one to archive the entirety of the site.
scopio 6y ago
I am the CEO at Scopio, www.scop.io/submit the most diverse photographer community. Visit us and join us. You can also see us on @scopioimages. We have the most talented artists in 150 countries and people get paid and build their network and careers. A real community for the underdog. Tons of perks and other opps once in.
tomcooks 6y ago
There goes one actually useful site. Removing my user, thanks for all the fish.
wunderflix 6y ago
Alternatives that I have been using: - https://stocksnap.io https://stocksnap.io - https://www.pexels.com https://www.pexels.com
- busymom0 6y ago
  Hadn't heard of https://stocksnap.io https://stocksnap.io Checked them out. While their pictures are less "professional" looking, I would actually prefer using them as the pics seem more authentic.
silvi9 6y ago
I'm very worried about this, as I've been using Unsplash's images for a lot of my blog posts. I'm just wondering how this will affect users of Unsplash's images in the long-term? Will we have to take down all our content that makes use of Unsplash imagery, in case Getty places a new license on the images or requires a fee to use the images? Or will they stay free? It's so hard to predict what will happen now that this acquisition has taken place. Unsplash was too good to be true, and now their time has come.
tracerbulletx 6y ago
If you want to create a free public resource do it, if you want to create a for profit business, by all means do that too. But for the love of all that's holy please stop trying to pretend you're making a free public resource and then backdooring in some crappy business model or exit strategy.
robertlf 6y ago
This is definitely a monopoly. Look at any image and chances are it comes from Getty. I'd like to see anti-trust investigations here.
branon 6y ago
Wasn't Getty responsible for the removal of direct links from Google Images? As always, with stuff like this: doesn't bode well, hope they don't screw it up, but my expectations are low.
whatevsyeahok 6y ago
Well, you certainly don’t acquire a company without trying to make a profit off it that’s the bottom line. how are they going to make back the offer they gave to unsplash if they don’t make money by monetizing it??
King-Aaron 6y ago
RIP Unsplash, looking forward to seeing even more watermarks on everything on the internet
yellowapple 6y ago
This demonstrates rather plainly that the paranoia (from myself and others) around the "Unsplash license" was warranted. > In 2016, we first met the Getty Images team. "...and then changed our default license within a year of that meeting to make it more palatable to corporate ownership and ensure that users don't have leverage to object. Totally a coincidence, nothing to do with entertaining buyouts, no siree." > This is not one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down. ...said pretty much every company that was bought to be shut down.
- cube00 6y ago
  I never understand why companies being acquired make statements like this. You're acquired, you no longer have control, you can no longer stand behind any statement with complete and absolute authority.
  - shostack 6y ago
    Because some not-insignificant of concerned end users will believe it and continue using the site, thus helping keep numbers on track for any deal terms or earn out targets.
i_work_at_GOOG 6y ago
Guys, don't worry. Getty will slowly destroy Unsplash. They are really good at breaking things and squeezing money out of stones.
wilbur-larch 6y ago
Is someone interested to build an open source alternative with me? Donation based to cover the server costs. Maybe the chance to pay for the service if you want to maintain a private image library (somehow like the previous Github pricing model was). Building a feature to allow Unsplash user to migrate their images with a single click. Code and content under MIT. Allowing videos, too. I would prefer Ruby on Rails as framework.
johnxie 6y ago
What are some good alternatives with API support? (free or paid)
KingOfCoders 6y ago
I had to prevent many employees from using Unsplash with people because they don't have a model release and most startup people don't know what that is.
dagorenouf 6y ago
“It’s not like one of these acquisitions where the acquired company gets shut down”. Good luck with that.
mastrsushi 6y ago
Unsplash must be the company that removes watermarks. Thank God, maybe they'll finally help Getty Images remove those pesky watermarks for them!
consultSKI 6y ago
A very sad day for me. Should I expect a refund on my crowdfunded support? With interest would be a small consolation. #justSayin
lloydatkinson 6y ago
What are some alternatives to Unsplash that provide very high quality photos, for when Getty inevitably ruins this site too?
zackkrida 6y ago
Does anyone know what happened to the original ~200k images with CC0 licenses on Unsplash, and how they can be found? For context: https://creativecommons.org/2017/06/22/unsplash/ https://creativecommons.org/2017/06/22/unsplash/ "Following the switch to the new Unsplash-branded license, there is no marking of works that were previously shared in the public domain using CC0. The Unsplash API restricts/obscures the full CC0 collection, which we believe to be about 200,000 images, but it isn’t possible to access the complete archive. In order to ensure that the commons is maintained, we hope that Unsplash will either a) properly mark all the works shared using CC0 and/or b) make available a full archive of the CC0 works so they can be shared on a platform that supports open licensing and public domain tools. Previous platforms that have gone under or abandoned open license tools have shared their CC archives for this purpose. We hope Unsplash will follow the same path."

567 points by baptlac 6y ago

psing 6y ago

Good for the Unsplash team. I've used their images on a bunch of my content. It's a great resource!

maaarghk 6y ago

Somewhat reminds me of Facebook and Whatsapp

abhiminator 6y ago
Absolutely. Came here to say this. Remember back in 2014 when Mark Zuckerberg promised that WhatsApp will function as a standalone app, completely sandboxed from the rest of the Facebook ecosystem? That didn't happen, did it?

EMM_386 6y ago

> After interacting with the team at Getty Images more and better understanding their long-term vision, we realized we shared so much alignment that going at this together could be much more impactful than going at it separately. Of course they will say that now, but isn't Unsplash a direct threat to Getty's bottom line? Unsplash images are free for commercial and non-commercial purposes with no permission needed. The only limitation is that you can't sell them or start a competing service. How long before this changes?

achow 6y ago
Absolutely. This is a dark day for 'open source' images.
- projectileboy 6y ago
  It’s hard to find examples of acquisitions that were good for the customers or the employees.
  - xzcvczx 6y ago
    in general i would agree, but i think that github might be one exception, the free plan was expanded to include private repo's, the redesign is annoying but usable they have made some mistakes with things like the dmca notice on youtube-dl but thankfully restored it and seem to be willing to help fight for it
dhimes 6y ago
I with you here. I love Unsplash- but I'm afraid it's doomed now.
endantwit 6y ago
(Almost every website that features free images already also shows ads from websites like Getty Images and iStockphoto.) I can also see it happen that Unsplash remains free forever, but that it will be used to lead more people to Getty Images. And that's very understandable from a Getty Images point of view, right?
- weego 6y ago
  My guess would be that unsplash will start adding source file size limits (that can unlocked with a Getty account) and long term quality and quantity will stagnate as its used as an acquisition funnel for their paid services
- ludamad 6y ago
  The nervous thing is that it would need to constantly defend its ROI to survive
dbrgn 6y ago
I recently started uploading pictures to Unsplash. I'm not sure I'll continue with that.
- dazc 6y ago
  Won't be long before they are Getty's images and not yours - or maybe I'm cynical?
dazc 6y ago
'How long before this changes?' I'd guess it will be a gradual process that starts with a constant nag that you can find more and better images if only you hand over your card details. Ultimately, it will be just another Getty brand.
james-bcn 6y ago
Yep. I used to love istockphoto before Getty purchased it and slowly eliminated it. The same will happen to Unsplash.
petercooper 6y ago
Unsplash images are free for commercial and non-commercial purposes with no permission needed. The only limitation is that you can't sell them or start a competing service. My theory is Getty is really paying for the right to sell them. Getty has a lot of very large customers who pay for access to their libraries and adding a new substantial library to their plans could benefit them. I'm thinking it's a bit like when AWS takes something like MongoDB and rolls out DocumentDB.. there are companies who are so entrenched with their AWS accounts that it seems more appealing than dealing with the hassle of opening a separate account and doing all 'the legal' for another service, even if it's free/cheaper. If a large agency or institution has a process around Getty and the way they assign rights and manage licenses, maybe they'll happily pay for the Unsplash library from Getty even if they could get it free separately(?)

chinathrow 6y ago

I recently discovered Pexels for anyone looking for other sources after this. https://www.pexels.com https://www.pexels.com

jiofih 6y ago
Tons of portraits in there, but I see no mention of signed releases?
yborg 6y ago
Very slick, and fast. But how do they pay for the site? There are no ads and no monetization I could find. The claim 4 billion image views a month, that has to cost them some bandwidth...
- dannyw 6y ago
  (I work for Canva). Pexels has affiliate ads (to paid stock sites) in specific locations; as an example, when your search returns zero Pexels results. Pexels content is also syndicated to Canva, where it is free to use (under the same license) by several hundred million users. This helps us provide a better Canva user experience, while giving more exposure to work on Pexels.
  - yborg 6y ago
    Ah. And Pexels is in fact owned by Canva, as is Pixabay. (What is it with Germany and picture-sharing sites?)

rvz 6y ago

A big day for the VCs. For everyone else using unsplash, get ready for a giant price hike.

css 6y ago

I was a contributor [0] to their second batch of photos (the first with user-generated content) when they initially launched under the name Ooomf because I love the philosophy of open-source. They even published an open-source photography book [1], which I was featured in [2]. It is very cool to stumble across my images across the web. The initial model was to receive a handful of user-generated photos, then handpick 10 each week and feature them [3]. I don't even see this feature page anymore. However, we all know that once you sell, you lose control of the product. While on day one the service will still exist, I doubt it will be around with its current philosophy for much longer, especially since Getty has already stolen all my images from 500px that do not have people (so they can sell them without releases). [0]: https://unsplash.com/@css https://unsplash.com/@css [1]: https://book.unsplash.com/ https://book.unsplash.com/ [2]: https://unsplash.com/photos/bSmKli4OTIY https://unsplash.com/photos/bSmKli4OTIY [3]: https://unsplash.com/collections/5/collection-%235%3A-crew https://unsplash.com/collections/5/collection-%235%3A-crew

liveoneggs 6y ago
what were the license terms of the upload?
- css 6y ago
  https://unsplash.com/license https://unsplash.com/license
  - liveoneggs 6y ago
    That is the license for downloading but does not specify what happens on uploading -- it appears photos uploaded to unsplash were given to unsplash, relinquishing all rights. The commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) would have retained ownership.
    - css 6y ago
      > it appears photos uploaded to unsplash were given to unsplash This is incorrect, according to section 6 of https://unsplash.com/terms https://unsplash.com/terms

rchowe 6y ago

Unsplash has a great product, however for Getty this seems to be a good deal more because they eliminate a competitor than because they acquire a good product/team. I read that Unsplash's plan to monetize was to sell banner ads and branded image placement, but that's gotta make less money than Getty slapping their normal business model onto Unsplash, right?

jiofih 6y ago

> this is not one of those acquisitions > will continue to operate as a stand-alone business Sounds funny after you read the exact same words for the 17th time!

toyg 6y ago
OurIncredibleJourney.jpg
kalleboo 6y ago
https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com

sarabad2021 6y ago

RIP. I'm sure this acquisition will be great for the team but it's pretty obvious Getty will fill the site with tricky sponsored images. They will also likely start fading out new free images until the site is mostly stale or filled with sponsored image links. I could also see them playing around with image licensing so it's less obvious how you can use them. Welp, I guess there's always Pexels.

weird-eye-issue 6y ago
"it's pretty obvious Getty will fill the site with tricky sponsored images" That is literally Unsplash's current business model already
busymom0 6y ago
They already have tricky sponsored images on their site. Also their "Brands" ads: https://unsplash.com/brands https://unsplash.com/brands

asicsp 6y ago

>Unsplash will continue to operate as a standalone brand I hope this means that their current free offerings will continue. https://www.pexels.com/ https://www.pexels.com/ also offers similar free collections.

brtkdotse 6y ago
Also https://pixabay.com https://pixabay.com.
- ncphil 6y ago
  +1 that.

machawinka 6y ago

Getty Images is the same old crony capitalism at its worse. Sad day for the Internet. RIP.

blunte 6y ago
Fortunately there are a lot of people who travel, and modern phones take remarkably good photos easily. The biggest immediate impact the "photographer" has is on framing the shot; but with high res images and you being willing to crop, you can do half of that job yourself. So there should be another to replace Unsplash. And if the founders can guess on being acquired in a few years, then this isn't a bad plan.

masona 6y ago

Getty already offers free images through embeddable content as well as brand partnerships, so it's natural for them to want a fresh injection of great work. Especially since their library has been rather stale for so long. It's hard to keep nice pictures coming in when photographers are getting royalty statements of only pennies. Of course, that's still more than Unsplash photographers receive. It will be interesting to see how Getty leverages this new model of 'images as ad network.' The Unsplash dashboard features the number of image views/downloads very prominently and artists treat it as a kind of cachet. An image with 100,000 views at $2.00 CPM is what, $200? It's strange to me that photographers brag about their view counts when it's plain evidence of how much the company is making off their shadow labor. Credit to the Unsplash team for taking this dissonance to its apex - it really did require a new way of viewing images as assets that hadn't exist before. I'm hopeful that they can bring that kind of thinking to Getty. I'm not that hopeful that any photographer benefits from this new partnership.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

voisin 6y ago

I am unclear why Getty Images would be interested, unless the purchase price was less than the cost of internally building its own loss leader open source image site that allows them to try to upsell to “premium” photos. Users have limited loyalty to any particular source of “free”. Getty presumably has a far larger library from which to pull images, so there can’t be any advantage to Unsplash’s library. I am guessing it was a very low purchase price.

petercooper 6y ago
This article from 2019 might provide some clues: https://www.chron.com/business/texas-inc/article/Getty-Images-struggles-to-frame-a-profitable-14901397.php https://www.chron.com/business/texas-inc/article/Getty-Image... It seems that one of Getty's biggest problems is that the variety of fresh imagery their customers expect Getty to have to hand has shot up while revenues have grown more modestly. Maybe Unsplash's library and base of contributors will actually provide some value in the long tail for their existing customers.. and it might be possible for them to offer that extended library to customers with existing packages without them really caring where it came from or that they could get it cheaper elsewhere.

toyg 6y ago

Pretty inevitable, it was actually surprising how long it lasted. Somebody gotta pay for that bandwidth.

RicoElectrico 6y ago

I could imagine tightening collaboration with Getty which could make sense, but once you let somebody acquire you, the game is over. No promise can hold. Can someone link me a list acquisition promises that new owners of various businesses broke in the past? There must be one.

momothereal 6y ago
The WhatsApp acquisition comes to mind: 1. Promise to not hoard and sell user data: https://blog.whatsapp.com/why-we-don-t-sell-ads https://blog.whatsapp.com/why-we-don-t-sell-ads 2. Get acquired by arguably the largest ad network and data hoarding giant 3. Proceed to flow user data to FB, forcing it down the throat of all their users
jamix 6y ago
https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

leowinterde 6y ago

RIP. Time to leave unsplash

blunte 6y ago
You won't have to leave them, as within a year there will be nothing recognizable to leave. It will have been replaced with free content wrapped in a bow and pricetag, or simply the best free content redirecting to similar paid content.

robinhood 6y ago

Good for Unsplash, sad for the community.

kirillzubovsky 6y ago

If you still want to upload your awesome shots to a community that might use them for their projects, I highly recommend Creative Market (https://creativemarket.com/kirill https://creativemarket.com/kirill). Started uploading photos there a few years ago, and I still get a payment every few months. You don’t have to charge a lot for your photos, but this way it’s something to keep you/site going, while also sharing what you have with the world.

anshumankmr 6y ago

I have been browsing Unsplash for five or six years now. I remember the time when it did not have ads to the how it is now. I understand the owner might not have been earning a lot from the site, so I get that he wanted to cash out. I just hope that the content remains of high quality and open source if possible.

JackPoach 6y ago

They can't change licensing for images that are already in use under Unsplash current agreement, can they?

blunte 6y ago
Whether they can or not is less relevant. Getty has already demonstrated that it is willing to sell free works to people who don't realize they can get it for free (legally). I'm not even talking about where they take other people's works and illegally resell it as their own... Getty, if judged by their past behaviors, is an evil company.
- dpwm 6y ago
  > Getty has already demonstrated that it is willing to sell free works to people who don't realize they can get it for free (legally). It seems plausible to me that there are some customers whose legal teams would be very uneasy about anything free. For those customers, Getty’s name and “reputability” may be the service they are paying for.
  - ziddoap 6y ago
    Assuming appropriate licensing, I have no idea why a legal team would be uneasy about using something free. Can you elaborate?
    - dpwm 6y ago
      > Assuming appropriate licensing For such customers the mere fact it is free would make the licensing questionable. Consider a service like unsplash: what vetting can there be that the people who upload actually hold the copyright? Do unsplash indemnify you if it turns out they never had permission? How does it look in a court, should it come to that? It’s not about paying money for the image as much as it’s about buying an assurance – even if it is only to be able to say "we acted in good faith and licensed this from a ‘reputable’ supplier.” Some legal teams are incredibly risk averse. Unsplash almost certainly isn’t considered by these sorts of customers. It’s not some kind of snobbery, it’s to avoid having to deal with the case where the one image that you build a multi-million dollar ad campaign on turns out not to have been improperly licensed.

MikeTaylor 6y ago

Has anyone made a complete archive of Unsplash, so that at least when Getty shut it down ("in order to serve customers metter by focusing on our core business") the images that have already been uploaded there will remain available?

HajiraSifre 6y ago
I think The Eye did archive it at some point. Also, it might be hard to find a scraper, since Unsplash likes (or at least liked) sending "friendly" requests to authors of scrapers on GitHub to remove their repos.
xd1936 6y ago
Excellent idea. I'd be curious to see what the current compressed database size is... Their (wonderful and brief) license does prohibits "the right to compile photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service", so this would have to be a personal archive.

beshrkayali 6y ago

Well, I'm deleting my stuff from there.

sarabad2021 6y ago
Interesting, I wonder how many other photographers will delete their photos. I'm curious, can you and will you be uploading them elsewhere?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mwambua 6y ago
  I'm no expert on this, but I believe their license implies that you can upload your photos elsewhere: https://unsplash.com/license https://unsplash.com/license However, deleting your photos does not prevent other people from using them in the future.
mwambua 6y ago
+1 Though I'm a little worried that the photos will end up there again... because of the permissive license.

question000 6y ago

If the automobile was invented today it would be owned by the largest conglomeration of horse breeders.

devoutsalsa 6y ago
And you'd start it by sticking your hand out of the window and slapping the side with your buggy whip.
DVk6dqsfyx5i3ii 6y ago
Henry Ford had to fight what was essentially a patent troll when he started his motor company. https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/11/05/the-original-patent-troll.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/11/05/the-origin...
cosmodisk 6y ago
I remember reading that at the beginning,there was a requirement for a person to walk ahead of an automobile and alert others that it's coming. It was related to horse industry lobbying too.
- KineticLensman 6y ago
  > there was a requirement for a person to walk ahead of an automobile Yes. In the UK this requirement lasted until 1896 when it was removed by an act of Parliament [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotives_on_Highways_Act_1896 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotives_on_Highways_Act_18...
  - yesenadam 6y ago
    The 1865 "Red Flag Act" "required all road locomotives, which included automobiles, to travel at a maximum of 4 mph (6.4 km/h) in the country and 2 mph (3.2 km/h) in the city, as well as requiring a man carrying a red flag to walk in front of road vehicles hauling multiple wagons. The 1896 Act removed some restrictions of the 1865 act and raised the speed to 14 mph (23 km/h). " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts

MikeTaylor 6y ago

I have to say this kind of announcement sticks in the craw. I get that Mikael Cho and colleagues created Unsplash and it's theirs to do with as they please: they don't owe us anything. But really, couldn't they just come right out and say "They offered us too much money, we couldn't resist, So long, suckers"?

blunte 6y ago
nobody needs to say that anymore; it is a given. if you sell your company to a Getty or Facebook or Zoom, for example, you really were just selling your customers and eliminating yourself as competition, for probably a nice payoff. if you had a bad VC deal, then you the founders/builders might even get nothing.
csbartus 6y ago
I remember the day Crew.co (another Mikael Cho venture) was sold to Dribbble. I was a member of, and I've felt cheated. I was sold and paid nothing. I've contributed to the value of Crew.co and I was ousted from a day to another. The official reason selling Crew was to focus on Unsplash. Another venture where network effects (free work done by contributors) can generate later a fortune for few. So ... we've been tricked. Our collective efforts was monetized by a few. That's network economy.

danso 6y ago

Loved reading about their journey on HN. Here's a 5-year-old thread about their costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11519085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11519085 Unfortunately the original link is down (and I could not find an archived version). But here's relevant material from the comments: > $18k is a lot of money to spend each month. Understanding the scale of Unsplash though can help explain the costs. > So at a cost of $18k per month you are getting 30M pages served, 140M API calls, 2.2M background jobs and 143TB of bandwidth. That sounds like a lot of bang for your buck. > The biggest chunk is the bandwidth charges from imgix. They do appear to be giving you a break on their published pricing, but not a huge one ($0.075/GB vs $0.08/GB). The CDN they are using appears to be Fastly, which also has a published price of $0.08/GB. So, there doesn't appear to be any overzealous markup on imgix's part.

llacb47 6y ago
https://archive.fo/iZyRK https://archive.fo/iZyRK
exikyut 6y ago
Nice news: the link in that HN article goes to backstage.crew.co, which was 302ing to dribbble.com. And while IA didn't save a copy of the dribbble page... ...it did save copies of the original links before they started 302ing. In fact, it saved across two different site reorganizations, https://web.archive.org/web/20160504110408/http://backstage.crew.co/what-does-unsplash-cost/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160504110408/http://backstage.... (backstage.crew.co) https://web.archive.org/web/20160903203745/https://crew.co/backstage/dispatch/what-does-unsplash-cost/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160903203745/https://crew.co/b... (crew.co/backstage) Both pages are fully intact; I think the theme on the 2nd one is a bit nicer. (This feels like a bit of a "1st-world-problems" discussion, making commentary about the most aesthetically pleasing presentation of obscurely archived webpages that've officially fallen off the internet.)
Aeolun 6y ago
I don’t mean to rain on their parade, but 30M requests served per month, while sounding really good, translates to 11 requests per second. And maybe 60 requests per second for their 140M API requests. If I were paying $2500 per month for that I’d be a bit sad.

jehb 6y ago

I'm going to instead see this as an opportunity for something better to emerge. My biggest problem with Unsplash is that they did not use a standard license that would easily be compatible with a Creative Commons or open source licensed work. If I incorporated images from Unsplash, suddenly I couldn't say "you're welcome to do whatever you like with my work." In fact, they used to use a CC0 license, but then changed, because other sites were copying them. As a user, this was a feature, not a bug. I would far prefer to see the community band together and produce an image sharing website with CC0 as the default license. Creative Commons image search right now is in need of some TLC from an engaged community.

onli 6y ago
Creative Commons caused many issues in countries like Germany, with photographers publishing under CC with attribution clause, then hunting for sites using photos without or with not 100% correct attribution (in illegal pro-profit cooperations with lawyers) and suing the site owners for thousands of dollars. It really would have to be CC0, but even mentioning CC will raise a red flag for many now.
- woah 6y ago
  What was illegal about what they were doing?
  - onli 6y ago
    The shared for-profit part of the scheme. It's one thing to hire a lawyer to get a license respected, it's another to institute to what amounts to a fraud scheme: Publish images with as hidden license requirements as possible, "hire" a lawyer for free with a profit sharing agreement, then sue who you can. That profit sharing agreement is illegal here, but hard to prove, and the Abmahnindustrie is actively protected by politicians (many of which are lawyers, pure coincidence of course). Edit: When they send in that notice (die Abmahnung) they will ask for money for incurred costs. Since they did not pay anything in advance - the lawyer worked for free - there were no costs. That's not legal here.

rPlayer6554 6y ago

Noooooo..... good-bye to Unsplash being a good site. Maybe it's just not a sustainable site, but I'm certainly sad to see it go.

krm01 6y ago

Very curious :Any info on what there revenue was? From what I've read/seen they were experimenting with a bunch of methods, but nothing seemed to really work (could be wrong). How much did they get acquired for?

preommr 6y ago

Potentially unpopular opinion: Good. I am tired of people just putting large images into their websites where the main image is barely relevant to the rest of the page. It was sloppy and lazy, like modern day clip art. And if someone really wants images, there are paid services like envato that are at least somewhat sustainable. These solutions are really affordable now and they've got very decent licensing terms.

rriepe 6y ago
It's always been weird to me that people are so averse to adding an extra 20kb of CSS, but they'll drop megabytes and megabytes of javascript and images into their site.
seanosaur 6y ago
> And if someone really wants images, there are paid services like envato that are at least somewhat sustainable. These solutions are really affordable now and they've got very decent licensing terms. Or, more likely, they'll just revert back to rips from Google Images. Maybe that's just the cynic in me, though.
rchaud 6y ago
This acquisition isn't going to change that. Getty isn't going to slap a watermark on every Unsplash image overnight. And even if they do, people will continue using meaningless images as thumbnails for their Medium posts from some other source like Pexels.
StavrosK 6y ago
You prefer walls of text, with nothing else?
- dingaling 6y ago
  Invert the scenario: imagine a blog post with photos by the author, but text pasted in from Wikipedia just to space the photos out a bit. It's essentially the same thing.

dudeinjapan 6y ago

Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. -- Robert Frost

ncphil 6y ago

A very sad beginning of the end, but even more sadly, predictable. Rampant cannibalism from the top down. Will it ever stop?

dbrgn 6y ago

This reminds me of 500px. I used to be a huge fan of 500px. It was the most beautiful photography site on the internet, designed with attention to every tiny detail. It allowed you to share your photos under a CC license, presented them beautifully and had fantastic curated feeds with photos by fantastic photographers. In 2018 they were acquired by an investor company and partnered exclusively with Getty. As a contributor, you were now pushed to "earn money with your pictures", CC licenses were discouraged and (I think) eventually removed. The site stopped getting optimized for aesthetics, it was now getting optimized for selling stock photos. I deleted all my photos and left. I hope this doesn't happen to Unsplash. But I'm not optimistic.

StavrosK 6y ago
Oh man, 500px used to be amazing. The photos were just beautiful. As you say, it died at some point (the quality started declining and they pushed some user-hostile stuff) and I never went back.
teryyy 6y ago
https://www.pexels.com/ https://www.pexels.com/ is another similar site, owned by Canva which seems to have kept its quality through the years.
- minxomat 6y ago
  Pexels is the best community for people who want to share their photos/videos (CC0). It's the worst community for monetising that in any way.
  - dbrgn 6y ago
    > It's the worst community for monetising that in any way. That sounds fantastic, I'll take a look! Edit: It's not CC0 though, right? The Pexels License looks similar to the Unsplash License.
    - dannyw 6y ago

josefresco 6y ago

I've lived/worked through Getty's purchase and destruction of iStock. I'm not eager to watch Unsplash suffer the same fate. RIP to another great service.

haxiomic 6y ago

My main association with Getty is their 'copyfraud' practises where they claim public domain images (NASA, Library of Congress etc) as their own and sell licenses[0]. They're also well known for aggressive acquisitions[1]. Perhaps this a good time to create a mirror [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Claiming_copyright_over_public_domain_content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Claiming_copyrigh... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Acquisitions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Acquisitions

ud_0 6y ago
Based on this behavior, my paranoid side is expecting a wave of copyright notices and invoices being sent to every single site that is using Unsplash images right now.
- dhimes 6y ago
  Hopefully they won't be able to revoke rights already given...
  - z77dj3kl 6y ago
    They can't, but they can attempt copyfraud as they seem to already be doing, see the aforementioned wiki article and public domain NASA/LoC images.
mfsch 6y ago
Careful about creating mirrors, the Unsplash license [1] explicitly disallows “compiling photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service”. [1]: https://unsplash.com/license https://unsplash.com/license
- haxiomic 6y ago
  Indeed, if you're putting something up online you probably just want to make it easy for users to switch rather than reuploading Offline personal archives and tools to create them I expect are permissible (IANAL)

bb101 6y ago

MySQL and Oracle all over again. Perhaps time to fork Unsplash and give birth to the MariaDB of open photography?

23B1 6y ago

"This is not one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down. Unsplash will continue to operate as a standalone brand and division of Getty Images." Sweet summer child

zucker42 6y ago
What is it about being the CEO of a startup that causes people to believe these promises?
- mritchie712 6y ago
  Everyone thinks “this time will be different”
  - dhimes 6y ago
    Indeed. The abused spouse syndrome. Although that's probably a more apt name for when you believe the same company for the nth time.
  - dekerta 6y ago
    I think it's more so something founders can tell themselves to feel better about the situation. Deep down they know it's not true
- IshKebab 6y ago
  What makes you think they believe it?
  - zucker42 6y ago
    For example, I honestly believe the Oculus founder believed the promises that you wouldn't ever need to use a FB account to use an Oculus, just given his public comments.
    - twentydollars 6y ago

ElFitz 6y ago

> Unsplash will continue to operate as a standalone brand and division of Getty Images. The entire Unsplash team will be staying and building Unsplash in the direction we have been. The main difference now is we have access to the resources and experience of Getty Images to help accelerate our plans to create the world’s most useful visual asset library. Sounds so familiar. How many times have we heard this one? How many times has it remained true in the long run?

dormento 6y ago
Just to save calories in case someone actually spends non-zero time thinking about this: it is never true. Its a "put 2 and 2 together" type thing. - Getty is a for-profit organization. - Profit means money. - Getty is lawsuit-happy. Now it is only a matter of time before Unsplash is "incredible journey'd".
- dhimes 6y ago
  We need an office pool for the timeline.
- lupire 6y ago
  Unsplash makes money too, and is lawsuit-compatible.
pnt12 6y ago
Almost never. The current exception nowadays seems to be Microsoft. Minecraft, npm, github seem to be doing good, and keeping their core values and strengths.
Qub3d 6y ago
For a historical record, see https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

corytheboyd 6y ago

Apologies if it’s super obvious to the rest of the people here, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what Unsplash offers? It’s not at all clear from the website, at least to me. Not intended as an attack, more as a PSA to make your purpose extremely obvious for the dumb people like me :)

shdon 6y ago
They launched in 2013 as a website for high quality copyright- and royalty-free images. The license has changed a few times, which is unfortunate. There is a bit more on their "about" page (which is hidden in the three-dots-menu) at https://unsplash.com/about https://unsplash.com/about
- corytheboyd 6y ago
  Ooooh that’s why I couldn’t find it, thanks!

subpixel 6y ago

What ever happened to their association with OST and micro crypto payments?

hobofan 6y ago
AFAIK OST is no more, and the company behind them pivoted to make an online fitness course portal[0]. I think there are some projects that were building things using their OpenST framework and continue to use that. [0]https://moxie.xyz/ https://moxie.xyz/

apercu 6y ago

Because of course it is.

cpach 6y ago

”Intellectual property is the oil of the 21 century. Look at the richest men a hundred years ago; they all made their money extracting natural resources or moving them around. All today’s richest men have made their money out of intellectual property.“ –Mark Getty, founder of Getty Images https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Getty https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Getty

lioeters 6y ago
Ugh, what a clueless analogy, blind to its own obsolescence and polluting effect on society.
- caslon 6y ago
  It's actually a perfect and terribly perceptive analogy. He's right! Like Rockefeller and Carnegie and his grandfather before him, he's made a load of money and made the world a worse place while doing it, all the while not even attempting to contribute anything to society. He doesn't claim to be a good man, he claims to be a rich man.
qznc 6y ago
My manager, who is American, once made a comparison that completely blew my mind: we laugh at native Americans handing over their land without really understanding that they're getting screwed in the transaction, and yet we just hand over our personal data to Google and Facebook without a second thought. We barely even have a concept of data ownership. –u/henrebotha https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/kd0s5c/dont_rely_on_a_single_company_for_all_your/gfuq9ex/ https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/kd0s5c/dont_rel...

kmclean 6y ago

> This is not one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down. I’ll believe it when I see it. I didn’t know there was any other kind of tech acquisition.

swyx 6y ago

does anyone have any guesstimates about their business side of things? i know they raised a series A focused on crypto (https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/15/unsplash-simple-token-series-a/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/15/unsplash-simple-token-seri...) but ironically they seem to have completely missed out on this NFT wave. serving up that many images every day is costly. im guessing they ran out of money.

shayanbahal 6y ago
That is a pretty interesting point. They could have gained more credit ($$$) and media attention from integrating NFT minting functionality for their huge user base.

polyrand 6y ago

They also did a FAQs page about it: https://help.unsplash.com/en/articles/5097983-unsplash-getty-images-faq https://help.unsplash.com/en/articles/5097983-unsplash-getty...

latexr 6y ago
Saving that to the Internet Archive[1]. Let’s revisit in a few years. [1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210330134914/https://help.unsplash.com/en/articles/5097983-unsplash-getty-images-faq http://web.archive.org/web/20210330134914/https://help.unspl...

Aeolun 6y ago

> This is not one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down. Translation: This is one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down. I wonder if it sounds as ridiculous to the one writing it as it does to someone reading.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

solmag 6y ago

It's going to turn out bad. Great site for now.

damsta 6y ago

We knew it would happen and with the bills they had to pay each month I understand the decision. I just wish Unsplash will not become another item on a list of services Getty killed/made worse.

yeswecatan 6y ago

What makes Unsplash so special? I've browsed it in the past and yea, it has some really nice pictures. Why would artists post their work (for free) there instead of another site?

lovegoblin 6y ago
Why do people contribute to open source?
- yeswecatan 6y ago
  Ok, so there isn't necessarily some secret sauce with Unsplash. If it all goes south after the acquisition, there's opportunity for a new one.

ArchUser2255 6y ago

RIP Unsplash

amelius 6y ago

Does anybody have a torrent of their free content before it is too late?

appleflaxen 6y ago

This is terrible news for end users.

munificent 6y ago

I was wondering what Unsplash's business model was, and I stumbled onto [1]: > Nor is it going to slap banner ads on every page of its website. Yes, it’s unveiling a digital advertising business, but Unsplash is taking a specific approach — working with companies to create branded photos, which will then appear on desirable searches. > Square, for example, could upload photos of the Square Register, which will then show up when Unsplash users search for “cash register” and other terms. > Brands working with Unsplash will get prominent placement in relevant searches, as well as their own brand channel, but Cho said the real impact only begins on the Unsplash website. So basically, without you realizing it, you may end up with paid product placement in your presentations and (pointless) header images on your Medium articles. Sometimes I wonder of the answer to the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter is: eventually all alien civilizations end up converting their entire society and economy into advertising monetization, all corporations consolidate into one giant inert behemoth, all real progress stops, and the species converts its entire planet into fuel for AdCoin cryptomining and winks out of existence. I miss the days where people just, like, started businesses that charged people for stuff, and people bought that stuff, and the business stayed in business without having to be acquired or snuffed out by a megacorp. [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/10/unsplash-for-brands/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/10/unsplash-for-brands/

Igelau 6y ago
This was no mystery. I'm pretty sure I saw a giant photo of a Coke bottle on Unsplash not that long ago. It has plenty of corporate users, and not in some secret shill sense, in a "This post from Docusign" kind of way.
daxterspeed 6y ago
The whole brands aspect has really confused me. If you search for "nature" on unsplash right now the first result is a picture of a person prominently holding a product in the most blatant product placement way possible. So far they're basically working as banner ads, no sensible user would ever want to use a sponsored photo for their work. I'm more afraid of how they'll modify their existing products to manipulate users into paying for "Premium" Getty stock photos over the free Unsplash ones :/

IceWreck 6y ago

They cant change the license of existing stuff right ? RIP.

leetrout 6y ago

I wish they’d been bought by smugmug instead.

xNeil 6y ago

I just use https://search.creativecommons.org https://search.creativecommons.org. Any photo I want/need is available, and I already clearly know the license. Unsplash etc. are good, but this is solid.

skeeter2020 6y ago

>> ... I’m excited about this acquisition ... because it’s not goodbye, it’s about acceleration >> This is not one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down. Unsplash will continue to operate as a standalone brand and division of Getty Images. >> Will Unsplash remain an independent brand? Yes. HAHA! You can't intentionally write parody this good! Just like every teenager swears they'll be nothing like their parents, every acquired startup swears nothing will change and their independence is preserved; why did you make a massive change to keep everything the same? Do you think Getty wants something for those bags of money they just handed you? I'm not against acquisitions, on the contrary. I just expect everyone, including the author, to acknowledge that this sort of post is solely to allay their conscience, not that of staff or customers. Funny enough the same hubris is probably what aided their success in the first place...

Igelau 6y ago
No one actually thinks that. Mad Libs Press Releases just has that wording baked in.

cvaidya1986 6y ago

Congratulations to the unsplash team!!

sneak 6y ago

Quick, pull the non-rate-limited API keys out of the unsplash desktop app with strings and start mirroring it from Tor (which they don't block). The images are public domain.

lovegoblin 6y ago
> The images are public domain. They are permissively licensed, but the photographers still own the copyrights. They are not public domain.
- sneak 6y ago
  Ahh, you're right of course. I forgot about that. I believe the permissive license allows one to archive the entirety of the site.

scopio 6y ago

I am the CEO at Scopio, www.scop.io/submit the most diverse photographer community. Visit us and join us. You can also see us on @scopioimages. We have the most talented artists in 150 countries and people get paid and build their network and careers. A real community for the underdog. Tons of perks and other opps once in.

tomcooks 6y ago

There goes one actually useful site. Removing my user, thanks for all the fish.

wunderflix 6y ago

Alternatives that I have been using: - https://stocksnap.io https://stocksnap.io - https://www.pexels.com https://www.pexels.com

busymom0 6y ago
Hadn't heard of https://stocksnap.io https://stocksnap.io Checked them out. While their pictures are less "professional" looking, I would actually prefer using them as the pics seem more authentic.

silvi9 6y ago

I'm very worried about this, as I've been using Unsplash's images for a lot of my blog posts. I'm just wondering how this will affect users of Unsplash's images in the long-term? Will we have to take down all our content that makes use of Unsplash imagery, in case Getty places a new license on the images or requires a fee to use the images? Or will they stay free? It's so hard to predict what will happen now that this acquisition has taken place. Unsplash was too good to be true, and now their time has come.

tracerbulletx 6y ago

If you want to create a free public resource do it, if you want to create a for profit business, by all means do that too. But for the love of all that's holy please stop trying to pretend you're making a free public resource and then backdooring in some crappy business model or exit strategy.

robertlf 6y ago

This is definitely a monopoly. Look at any image and chances are it comes from Getty. I'd like to see anti-trust investigations here.

branon 6y ago

Wasn't Getty responsible for the removal of direct links from Google Images? As always, with stuff like this: doesn't bode well, hope they don't screw it up, but my expectations are low.

whatevsyeahok 6y ago

Well, you certainly don’t acquire a company without trying to make a profit off it that’s the bottom line. how are they going to make back the offer they gave to unsplash if they don’t make money by monetizing it??

King-Aaron 6y ago

RIP Unsplash, looking forward to seeing even more watermarks on everything on the internet

yellowapple 6y ago

This demonstrates rather plainly that the paranoia (from myself and others) around the "Unsplash license" was warranted. > In 2016, we first met the Getty Images team. "...and then changed our default license within a year of that meeting to make it more palatable to corporate ownership and ensure that users don't have leverage to object. Totally a coincidence, nothing to do with entertaining buyouts, no siree." > This is not one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down. ...said pretty much every company that was bought to be shut down.

cube00 6y ago
I never understand why companies being acquired make statements like this. You're acquired, you no longer have control, you can no longer stand behind any statement with complete and absolute authority.
- shostack 6y ago
  Because some not-insignificant of concerned end users will believe it and continue using the site, thus helping keep numbers on track for any deal terms or earn out targets.

i_work_at_GOOG 6y ago

Guys, don't worry. Getty will slowly destroy Unsplash. They are really good at breaking things and squeezing money out of stones.

wilbur-larch 6y ago

Is someone interested to build an open source alternative with me? Donation based to cover the server costs. Maybe the chance to pay for the service if you want to maintain a private image library (somehow like the previous Github pricing model was). Building a feature to allow Unsplash user to migrate their images with a single click. Code and content under MIT. Allowing videos, too. I would prefer Ruby on Rails as framework.

johnxie 6y ago

What are some good alternatives with API support? (free or paid)

KingOfCoders 6y ago

I had to prevent many employees from using Unsplash with people because they don't have a model release and most startup people don't know what that is.

dagorenouf 6y ago

“It’s not like one of these acquisitions where the acquired company gets shut down”. Good luck with that.

mastrsushi 6y ago

Unsplash must be the company that removes watermarks. Thank God, maybe they'll finally help Getty Images remove those pesky watermarks for them!

consultSKI 6y ago

A very sad day for me. Should I expect a refund on my crowdfunded support? With interest would be a small consolation. #justSayin

lloydatkinson 6y ago

What are some alternatives to Unsplash that provide very high quality photos, for when Getty inevitably ruins this site too?

zackkrida 6y ago

Does anyone know what happened to the original ~200k images with CC0 licenses on Unsplash, and how they can be found? For context: https://creativecommons.org/2017/06/22/unsplash/ https://creativecommons.org/2017/06/22/unsplash/ "Following the switch to the new Unsplash-branded license, there is no marking of works that were previously shared in the public domain using CC0. The Unsplash API restricts/obscures the full CC0 collection, which we believe to be about 200,000 images, but it isn’t possible to access the complete archive. In order to ensure that the commons is maintained, we hope that Unsplash will either a) properly mark all the works shared using CC0 and/or b) make available a full archive of the CC0 works so they can be shared on a platform that supports open licensing and public domain tools. Previous platforms that have gone under or abandoned open license tools have shared their CC archives for this purpose. We hope Unsplash will follow the same path."