What is Unsplash?
Unsplash is a popular website with a lot of free photos that you can use without any payment or getting permission first.
The website originated from a Tumblr blog in 2013 and has grown rapidly since then.
Why should you look for an Unsplash alternative?
Unsplash has grown rapidly, however Unsplash does not have the most images in its database. They also still don’t have videos.
As an example for this blog, let’s use the search term Beach. This has 10k images as a result on Unsplash.
Pixabay
Pixabay is a great Unsplash alternative. Like Unsplash, it allows you to use the images for free, but with a few exceptions.
Pixabay had about 70 thousand images for the term “Beach”.
Pexels
You can find the Pexels license here. You can modify the images for personal and commercial use and use them without reference.
At Pexels there were about 10 thousand images for the term “Beach”.
Flickr
Flickr has images with all kinds of licenses. Therefore you have to click on “Any license” and then activate the filter “Commercial use & mods allowed”. This way you will only get images that are allowed to be used and customized commercially.
Flickr found over 1.6 million images for the term “Beach”.
In conclusion
While Unsplash does have a large user base and plenty of free photos, Pixabay and Flickr offer far more in the way of video and larger databases, as well as a variety of licenses for personal and commercial usage.
