Darkroom Theme (for Unsplash)

Tyler Lastovich
Jul 28, 2017 · 3 min read

Turn the lights out with this clean, dark-gray theme.

What is it?

A full-featured dark theme for Unsplash. :)

(If you haven’t heard of Unsplash, it is an awesome photo community where everything is free — you should really check it out!)

I really enjoy looking at pictures on Unsplash (and contributing), but sometimes that sea of white is just too much for me. I doubt I am alone in this, so I figured I would have a go at writing a new look for the site. I had never made a theme for a running website, but I knew it was possible using something called injection. Essentially I just replaced all the color variables for elements after they have loaded. A cheap hack, but it does the trick.

What does it look like?

Darkroom is a low contrast gray theme. Think Adobe products. Almost no full white or black used, so virtually every element was changed. It works quite well on a nice monitor,

A GIF of me clicking random things is worth 10,000 words. (the ugly white flashing has since been fixed)

Change: Image Submission

I never really cared for how you couldn’t preview what an image looked like as you uploaded it, so I modified the submission page design to ditch the overlay.

Before
After

How do you get It?

You have a few options. Your browser can’t change styles by default, so you will need to get a free plugin to help you out.

1. Get a browser plugin so you can install user styles

Stylish (Chrome, Safari, Firefox) or Stylus (Vivaldi, Chrome)

There are a number of other plugins that will work too if you don’t like these

2. Install Darkroom from Userstyles.

You can also just go to unsplash.com and the extension icon will light up letting you know a theme is available :)


— OR —

Download the app [potentially out of date]

#powertools

I also packaged it up as an electron app (Unsplash + Darkroom), meaning that it will run as a stand alone program on your computer (basically just a themed browser). While it looks nice because there is no URL bar or navigation to crop the image that also makes it a bit less usable since there is no forward/back functionality. For just viewing pictures it is ideal (the GIF above was recorded from the app). It even has a gray icon.

** I suggest using the browser version if you want to stay the most up-to-date.

Get Unsplash + Darkroom App — > MAC [last updated Sept. 22]

Reality

This is a the theme equivalent of scraping a webpage, so it WILL break at some point, live it up while you can!

— Happy Splashing!

Tyler Lastovich

Written by

Technical generalist. Investing+future tech+generative media • lastovich.me

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