Life
Fed up with Unsplash
June 30, 2020
I finally got fed up with Unsplash.com and their oppressive rules for submission. In retrospect, uploading my photos to the Unsplash site was a pretty bad idea; not only did I lose control of my work for the photos I submitted, but I never realized any gain from posting them on Unsplash. Not a single downloader thanked me or gave me attribution for my work and certainly no one ever sent me a request for a print or offered to pay. Also, a lot of my work ended up on a Chinese site that specializes in photo thievery. I alerted Unsplash to this development, but I never heard a word in reply. I guess they got what they wanted from me and didn’t care to help protect my work.
Thankfully, I only uploaded at 3K by 2K resolution so my photos can’t really be printed by downloaders without a significant deterioration of detail. Nevertheless, I would counsel other photographers and visual creators against posting to Unsplash or any of the other parasitic sites that build their business model on exploiting artists. From now on, I’ll only be posting my work to sites I control.
