Unsplash Community Update August

At the start of each month we email an update to the photographers in the Unsplash Community. It’s a chance for us to let people know what we’ve been working on as a team, what’s coming next and ways to get more involved in the Community.

Literally cross-posted directly to Medium, here’s the email that was sent out this month…

Wotcha!

Annie here from the Unsplash team, virtually creeping into your inbox to wax lyrical about all things Unsplash Community.

Firstly, a heads up that we have some cracking curators lined up over the next month, including hip-hop artist Nas (yes really!) Towards the end of September the mighty Billabong will be curating a collection; you have until the 20th to submit photos on the theme of action / surfing / water to be considered. 🏄

I don’t know about you, but it feels like August whizzed by in a flash. Here’s a catch up of what features were rolled out last month (and a sneaky peek at what’s next #omgfollowing) …

Say ‘Howdy!’ to Unsplash Instant 2

New features include:

• ❤ Likes — the most requested feature is now a reality.
• New vetted photos (there’s a new collection it pulls from)
• Overhaul of the visual design (similar to our new photo page, it’s lighter and more open)
• Share photos with friends via Facebook or Twitter
• Optimized to load faster

Please note: Unsplash Instant 2 requires new permissions, so if you have the old version of the extension installed you’ll need to re-enable it in your extensions by going to: chrome://extensions/ in your address bar or by going to Chrome ▸ Preferences ▸ Extensions

File Metadata

One of the things we’ve wanted to do for a while was add in information from the photo to the full-resolution file downloads. It’s been a common request from the community, as it’s an easy way to help some of the problems that arise when they try to use a photo from Unsplash that they downloaded months or even years ago. When we made the switch to using JPEGMini for the full-resolution downloads a few weeks ago, this became an option.

We’ve backfilled all of the photos to include links to the photographer, the photo, the EXIF data, and the location.

New Homepage Feed

The homepage feed is changing. We’re bringing more photos to the homepage, with 10 photos being selected and published each day.

Version 1 sets up the infrastructure for activities and the concepts of feeds in Unsplash, but it also (hopefully) gives us a quick-win by getting more quality content onto our highest traffic page. This version of the feed was rolled out to 50% of users last week, at random.

In future versions we’ll be working towards a feed that is unique to the user and uses a number of data-points to serve a version of the feed that gets the highest engagement.

What’s next — Following & Activities

Yep, following. Take it from me I’m sitting here fist pumping and grinning at the thought of this. As someone who uploads photos to Unsplash regularly, this future feature particularly excites me.
Above you can see a sneak peek at Kirill’s vision of what that that might look like.

Monthly Community Collection

It’s that time again! We would love you to send us a link to a favourite photo that you submitted to Unsplash in the month of August so that we can add it to our ever-growing Community Picks Collection.

Unsplash IG Weekend Takeover

We’ve opened up taking over our Instagram feed for the weekend to all. If you are interested in getting involved you can find out all the info, including how to send your choices to us here on Medium.
❤️
Big thanks to Rosan Harmens, Zac Nielson, Drew Collins, Anna Prigkipaki who took over our IG feed in August.

As always, thanks for choosing to be part of the Unsplash Community.
Muchos love fellow photography loving amigos,

— Annie, Community at Unsplash

P.S. ‘The Rise of Unsplash’ podcast from Candid features some really interesting discussion on the growth of Unsplash, including thoughts on submitting photos and how it may affect the future of photography. Head to 30:40 in to listen along.