If you are interested in photography, looking for high quality free images to use in your blogs, or you are an amateur photographer like myself, you should check out Unsplash. It is a great site to get free photos as well as get tons of exposure for your own photography. Here is how it works.
Create an account (takes a whole 3-5 minutes).
Upload photos. Once you upload photos they will automatically go into review status.
Wait for approval. According to the site, photos get manually reviewed by a team looking for the best of the best to feature on the site. Obviously if you upload something that does not meet their terms, the photo will be flagged.
Photos get approved (hooray!). Once photos are approved, they will be public on your profile. You can set them to private if you do not want to share them publicly as well.
If your photo is deemed worthy enough, it will become searchable or featured. These are manual statuses that are given to high quality photos that will be searchable on the site. Any photo in these statuses will get you TONS of views and can be found under the tags you put on the photo.
I have been on Unsplash for a little over a month and you can see my stats below. Each of my searchable photos are getting 4-5 thousand views per month. I am not sure if the views slow down after a while, so I will have to wait and see.
Still, it's not uncommon to see photos with 1-2 million total views and 10-12k downloads. So if you are an amateur photographer, this is a great way to get your name out there and your work noticed. People don't seem to use the like feature very much, so I just consider downloads as likes.
I should mention as well that any photo that you upload to Unsplash are under the Unsplash license so that they become free for others to download or use. So this site does not provide any opportunity to monetize your photos. Believe it or not, I actually like that about the site. It makes it all about the work, the art and the artist, not about making money.
For more information on how it works you can reference: Contributing to Unsplash
If you feel inclined, you can also check out my Unsplash below. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments.
Love to all.
Photo Credits:
William Bayreuther