I love photography and I love it to give away my photos for free, to see what others do with them.
Maybe this sounds weird in a world where anything has its price tag. But I don’t see photography (at the moment) as a business for me. I have done some small jobs here and there but nothing really worth mentioning.
I discovered Unsplash.com in 2018 and I liked the philosophy behind this service. I started uploading my first photo, to see how the platform works. My first photo already got promoted on the home page, this motivated me to keep on uploading photos to this platform. A few weeks later they featured me on their Instagram and I got a lot of attention.
Why uploading to Unsplash?
Uploading your photos to Unsplash means to give away (nearly) all rights. Everyone can download it and use it, they don’t even have to credit the photographer. This sounds really bad in the first place for the photographer, but it isn’t.
Let me explain why. Unsplash appreciates you as a photographer and if you upload good stuff, they will promote you. You will get known as a photographer and you will see your photos all over the internet. Not all are crediting the photographer when using a picture, but a lot do. The service is already collaborating with apps like Trello, Squarespace, WordPress, Sketch, and a lot more. From those apps you have easy access to the Unsplash library, I also love to use this for my own projects.
“But why you don’t upload to stock photos sides where you get paid?” I hear this question often. The thing is, that I already thought about uploading my work to other sites where I maybe would earn a few bucks. But in my opinion, it is not worth it, till you make high-quality photo sets that sell. For example a photo series of friends that enjoy a hike, which you can use for storytelling. My photos often have no story behind, most of them (I would say 95%) are landscape photos. You can use them as wallpaper, or header images, and that’s it.
When uploading to a paid stock photo site my photos wouldn’t get as much attention and I wouldn’t earn much.
Uploading to Unsplash helps me to spread out my work to the world. I already got a lot of messages from people who discovered me there, that they like my photos. Sometimes they even send me a picture, where they are actually using it.
Inspiring people to do great work, using my work. This is what I love about this.
What’s my future plan with Unsplash?
I will continue uploading my photos to Unsplash.com. I see a lot of opportunities and potential in this service. Maybe I will get a job offer one day from a user that discovers me or they decide to monetize the platform like YouTube did.
And if not, no big deal. Otherwise, my photos would be stored on an external hard drive and nobody would ever see them, except my Instagram followers.
My Stats
Unsplash has this great feature that they let you see how many people already saw or downloaded your pictures on their side ore via the API.
I think those are some impressive figures, and I am blown away every time I see it. In my opinion, no other service would be able to display your photos to such a big audience.
What are your thoughts about this? Let me know it in the comments below.
Thanks for reading,
- Daniel
