Introducing Uses

The Unsplash library just recently passed 3 billion downloads. That’s 3 billion articles, blog posts, presentations, wallpapers, school projects, social media, and art made better because of Unsplash photos.

For years, Unsplash contributors have been asking to see these creations so that they can connect with the creators and communities using their imagery, and today we’re excited to roll out the first version to all contributors.

This has been a huge undertaking from our team that involved building our own visual matching technology powered by machine learning, our own web crawler (ala Google), and a completely revised image stats system to better understand placement and context.

In your stats area you’ll find a new section called ‘Uses’ that contains information and links to some of the notable public places that your images have been used. At the timing of writing, we’ve only crawled a tiny portion of the internet, but we’ve already found over 100,000 matching uses.

With over 10,000 API integrations, we’re also able to surface information about the uses from some of our notable API integrations. Since these uses are private by default, we don’t include a URL, but we’re able to let you know in realtime when your photo is used by an integration.

With the system in place, our team will continue to scale up the number of uses collected each month, expand the system to collect from more sources, differentiate new and already seen uses, and allow API integrations to report their own public uses via our API.