The Unsplash Community is full of people of all ages, from all walks of life, sharing and using images creatively. In short, it’s an awesome thing to be a part of.

It’s really important for everyone that as our community grows, it remains a positive and respectful space for people to share their creative work and ideas, making new connections along the way (aka be nice and don’t spam).

These Community Guidelines lay out some basic ways we can achieve this together.

Usernames

Names

Bios

Donations

Collections

Image descriptions

Attribution requests

Tagging

Messaging
Harassment

Slack

Username allocation is on a first-come first-served basis. If a username that you want is already taken we suggest that you try using underscores or numbers to create a variation. Some members of our community use Unsplash to create private collections of images, so while an account may seem dormant, it can be active.

We reserve the right to reclaim an account’s username if:

Accounts that have had their username reclaimed will be given the same username followed by a random 3-digit number (e.g. “@nike” becomes “@nike354”).

Accounts that have had their username reclaimed will be notified via email and informed as to why their username was reclaimed: inactivity or trademarked brand username.
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Your name will be credited to your images both on Unsplash.com, our apps, and via third party extensions using our API. To avoid confusion we ask that you:

This is the place to tell everyone about yourself. Share who you are and what you do. Highlight what makes you special or inspires you to take images. Let people know you’re available for hire. It can also be a great place to direct people to your bio link. Some possible uses:

Please refrain from using derogatory language and profanity in your bio.

Please do not add mandatory donation requests in bios or image descriptions.
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Collections are ways to save and order images on Unsplash. You can create as many collections as you’d like. Many people use collections to save images for future use or for inspiration.

Notifications are sent to a contributor when one of their images is added to a collection, so please respect the contributors and models when giving a title and description to a collection.

Collections which cause offence will be removed from Unsplash immediately and an email to explain why will be sent out to the creator of the collection.

To flag a collection to the Unsplash Team, please drop us an email at support@unsplash.com.
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Descriptions are a way for a contributor to share information about images — and also gives a boost to an image's search-ability. Added upon submission, or later via the Edit modal, stories can be viewed beneath any image in single image view.

We have a few simple guidelines for titles and stories, and some tips to help you maximize your chances of being featured:

Whilst we actively encourage attribution, reaching out directly to users to demand or request crediting or inserting urls is against our Guidelines and can cause confusion for our community.
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There are two types of tags that can be added to images. Tags added by the contributor and AI generated tags given by our system.

We ask that you refrain from adding irrelevant tags to images, as this disrupts search on our platform. Irrelevant tags will be removed and in some cases will affect image visibility of all the images on an account. In  extreme cases this may even lead to a platform ban.

Here's a handy guide to getting your images found on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/blog/how-to-get-your-photos-found/

Incorrect and irrelevant tags can be reported directly to our team at  support@unsplash.com.
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The option to message fellow Unsplash members is available on profiles, unless the member has chosen to opt out of the feature.

Here’s our recommended best practices when it comes to sending a message:

Users that repeatedly break these guidelines risk having their account locked.

As an open and safe community, we will not tolerate harassment, directly or indirectly of our contributors or users.
If you encounter harassment we recommend you don’t respond, and contact us at support@unsplash.com if the behaviour continues.

We have an engaged and lively Slack community, which is open to the whole Unsplash community.

To ensure the smooth running and happy vibes of the community: