October 24, 2018

Unsplash’s API

Use the world’s most powerful photo engine.

Unsplash: Unlike Any Creative Platform

Unsplash is the fastest growing library of over 900k+ free, quality, high-definition, license-free photos in the world. Every photo on Unsplash is free to use, for both personal and commercial use. No payments and no license subscriptions required.

Unsplash makes the experience of finding quality, usable photography easier, faster, and better than ever, which is why it’s trusted by the world’s best product teams and products for creators.

Stats

You can view Unsplash’s stats in real-time, but here are a few bullet points:

👏 Photos on Unsplash are contributed by over 127k+ photographers and used by 70+ million creatives
⚡ 11 billion+ photos are served every month
⬇️ 55 million+ photos are downloaded every month
🔥 20 photos are downloaded every second (for context, that’s the size of Adobe Stock, Shutterstock, and Getty combined)

Unsplash supporting 20 photo downloads per second across 101 countries and every continent.

The Unsplash Library

Quality of library and accessibility is what differentiates Unsplash to traditional stock photo sites that exist today.

Manual curation
Our Editorial team curates every photo distributed on Unsplash to ensure our library is updated with authentic, world-class, high-res, photography. No more cheesy, stock photos. We focus on quality, not quantity.
Accessibility
All photos are licensed under the Unsplash License, making them free for both personal and commercial uses. No need for payments or confusing licenses with expiration dates.
Content guaranteed safe for work
Unsplash photos are PG-13 and manually reviewed before being exposed on Unsplash or distributed through Unsplash’s API. Our API can also fetch custom collections of photos to further guarantee quality and security.
Photo exclusivity
Unsplash’s library is exclusive to Unsplash — meaning, no other stock photo site can host or distribute these photos on their sites. Partnering with Unsplash means you have access to unique, beautiful content.

API Case Studies

Unsplash’s API is the most powerful photo engine in the world with over 1000+ partners, more than 1 billion+ calls per month, and a 99.998% uptime in the last 30 days.

It’s fast, flexible, and completely free to use. Here are a few of our favourite partners using the API:

API Resource Links:

API Documentation
Here’s where you’ll see some of the features we do around dynamic photo sizing, collections, orientation filtering, etc.
API Site
Here’s where you can signup to play with the API.
API Guidelines

API Technical Details:

JSON API (i.e. all requests to api.unsplash.com):
Built on Ruby on Rails
Currently handles 1 billion+ requests and 8.12 billion image requests over the last 30 days
Same API we run unsplash.com and Unsplash for iOS with
99.998% up-time measured over the last 30 days
Hosted on AWS with high-availability Postgres and Redis stores. Elasticsearch backs the search and is distributed and fault-tolerant
Fronted by a distributed HTTP cache via Fastly. The Fastly HTTP cache is most effective when used with non-oauth authorized requests. This means that the responses aren’t customized to a ‘logged in’ user, which is the way the majority of our API partners use the API.
Automatic status monitoring and reporting with a dev-ops team on-call