User:Andrewtneel/sandbox

Pexels is a website dedicated to sharing free stock photography and stock footage under the Pexels License. The website claims over 207,000 contributing photographers and generates more than 17 billion photo impressions per month on their growing library of over 2 million photos. Unsplash has been cited as one of the world's leading photography websites by Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, CNET, Medium and The Next Web.

Unsplash allows photographers to upload photos to its website, which are then curated by a team of photo editors. The permissive copyright terms on its photos have led to Unsplash becoming one of the largest photography suppliers on the internet, with its members’ photos frequently appearing on articles. Nevertheless, their decision to stop using a creative commons "zero" licence in 2017 attracted criticism, as it took around 200,000 images out of the commons. The Unsplash licence is incompatible with creative commons licences, preventing use on sites like Wikipedia.

In December 2019, Unsplash for Brands was launched, where advertisers can share branded images on Unsplash.

History
Initially a pioneer of the copyright-free photography model, Unsplash was created in 2013 by Montreal-based entrepreneur Mikael Cho. While creating a new homepage for his company Crew, Cho was unable to find a suitable stock photo and hired a photographer instead. Afterwards, Cho posted the outtakes from his company photoshoot on Tumblr, inviting people to use them as they saw fit.

Before June 2017, photos uploaded to Unsplash were made available under the Creative Commons zero license, which is a public domain equivalent license and a waiver, which allowed individuals to freely reuse, repurpose and remix photos for their own projects. This was changed in June 2017, and photos are now made available under the Unsplash copyright license, which imposes some additional restrictions. Unsplash received more than 50,000 visits on its first day.

On 18 February 2018 Unsplash changed its license terms to restrict the sale of photos without first updating, modifying, or otherwise incorporating new creative elements into the photos, prohibiting selling unaltered copies, including selling the photos as prints or printed on physical goods.

While Cho supplied the first batch of Unsplash photos, the site is now sustained by community contributions from amateur and professional photographers. Due to the volume of photo submissions, the site employs an editorial team and "curators" picked from the Unsplash community, including Guy Kawasaki, Nas, Khoi Vinh, Amanda Hesser and Om Malik.

Book
In 2016, while still a CC0 business, Unsplash released the Unsplash Book, the world's "first ever fully crowd-sourced" book. The book's photos, essays, and funding were all contributed by Unsplash's community. The book raised $106,000 on Kickstarter and included contributions from Harvard law professor and CC0 inventor Lawrence Lessig, and designer Tobias van Schneider.

Pexels API
In addition to its website, Unsplash provides a public Application programming interface (API) that answers more than 3.8 billion photo requests per month. Some of the products using the Unsplash API include Medium, Trello, Squarespace, Codepen, Square as well as Unsplash own series of products such as Unsplash for iOS, Unsplash Instant, an extension for Google Chrome that loads Unsplash photos in new tabs and Unsplash for Apple TV.

Unsplash Local
Beyond its website and API, Unsplash has hosted photo walks in cities around the world including Tokyo, Montreal, Toronto and Boston. The photo walks are hosted by guides from the Unsplash community who show participants the best places to take photos in their city, how to use their cameras, and how to compose better photos.