Unsplash Is Officially Dead — Here Are the Smarter Alternatives
In the last few weeks, Unsplash doubled down on its losing strategy. It created a mass exodus.
When a great company gets bought by a big company it dies.
Big corporations only understand dollars, not users. It’s annoying as f*ck. Time and time again acquisitions happen and the original business is destroyed. Photo site Unsplash got bought by Getty Images.
It took less than a year to wipe them out.
Why Unsplash kicked ass
Before Unsplash the world was full of stock photo sites.
The images were typically cheesy. There’d be like a dude in a suit jumping in the air and pretending to love his job. It got boring real fast.
Unsplash came on the scene. Anyone could take a beautiful photo with their camera and upload it for free. These images became a honey pot for online writers who needed a nice picture under their headline.
For years Unsplash had the market cornered. They could do no wrong.
The acquisition from hell
Then Getty Images bought Unsplash and it took no time at all for them to stamp their unique flavor of sh*t all over the site.
Here’s what they did. Ads. Ads everywhere.
They added Unsplash+ images throughout their galleries too. These photos require a subscription. So the free image site is now a paid one. They’ll tease you with crap images and charge you for mediocre images.
Then they thought “users are so stupid. Let’s also trick them by putting paid stock images they hate at the top of their search results.”
Just to piss us off they added paid stock photos to the bottom of an image search, too. Dumbasses.
Ads ruined the internet. There are smarter ways to make money.
The mass exodus from Unsplash
In the last few weeks, Unsplash doubled down on its losing strategy.
As a result the good photographers ran for the hills. Where did they go? Over to Pexels dot com. It’s not the best site but at least it doesn’t have all the stupid ads and upsells.
I suspect someone else will build a replacement for Unsplash soon enough. One that respects creators and doesn’t bleed them dry.
The better option for smart creators
Writers need images like I need Bubble Tea at Disney land when I take my kiddo. I watch what the pros do. Know how they’re fighting the Unsplash virus? Artificial Intelligence.
AI can now create images for you at no cost. That’s right, $0!!!
Here are the platforms smart creators now use for images instead of Unsplash ad hell:
The cool thing about these options is each image can be totally unique. And the AI is a giant weirdo. It can mash up all sorts of images to produce the most bizarre results.
Examples:
The downside of some of these alternatives is that their signup process isn’t great. The good ones require you to join a Discord server rather than log in with an email.
Discord is hard to use and drenches you in a firehose of content. It takes a decent amount of time to figure out how to create an image from nothing if you’ve never done it before.
My friend Jack Raines created Van Gogh artwork for his blog with DALL-E, which seems to be the easiest to use of the options. All you have to do is say what you want the picture to be. You can even select the style.
Final Thought
I’ve had enough of Unsplash.
It’s clear creators are running in the other direction to better options that don’t fondle them with ads all day. AI-generated images are starting to look like a real alternative. So…
Is Unsplash dead in your opinion, or am I just an angry millennial boomer? And will you use AI-generated images?
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