Unsplash API: our terms explained
Terms and conditions — they suck.
We wish there was a simpler way to legally protect our community, our company, and you better, but there isn’t. We’ve tried to work with our lawyers to make them as clear as possible, but there’s no getting around it: terms aren’t made for you or me, they’re made for lawyers.
Legally, we have to preface any simplification of our terms with the standard:
These are not a replacement for any clause in our terms. In a legal case, the wording of the terms preside over any other explanation or example. Read the terms to fully understand what you are agreeing to
However, in the interest of brevity (and because we’re regular developers too, not lawyers), we wanted to try our best to make the terms understandable.
Here’s a simplification of our API terms, with the key, possibly non-standard terms, highlighted.
1. You cannot use the Unsplash name directly in your application name.
This means you can’t title your application as “Unsplash for Photoshop”, “Unsplasher”, “Ensplash”, “Unsplash Wallpapers” etc.
There are infinite possibilities for possible names, so get creative.
Why?
At first, we let applications call themselves whatever they wanted — including using names similar to Unsplash. But then our inbox started exploding with support questions for apps that we never made, nor have any control over.
We already get thousands of emails a month for legitimate questions and problems that we can help with. We’d prefer to not have hundreds more related to things we can’t fix, have no control over, or have no information for.
2. You cannot use the Unsplash logo as an app icon.
This means you cannot use a similar-looking black camera icon as your logo.
Why?
We don’t claim to have invented the black camera logo, but similar to the reasons stated above, when the community sees a black camera logo and Unsplash photos, they assume it’s an official Unsplash application. Then our support inbox fills up and we have to send out hundreds of emails apologizing for the confusion.
3. You cannot replicate the core user experience of unsplash.com
This one is a little more fuzzy. Basically, unless you’re trying to run a competing site, like a photography community or stock photo site, we’re good.
If you think your usage might conflict, shoot us an email and we can let you know ahead of time.
Why?
We’re all for remixing and open-source, but the API costs us a non-trivial amount of money to host, operate, and provide support for. We’d prefer not to be paying to actively support clones.
4. If using the production-level rate-limiting, you must credit the photographers with a link back to their Unsplash profile.
Credit should take the form of either:
Photo by Annie Spratt / Unsplash
or
If the photo is contained within something already giving credit to Unsplash, simply:
Photo by Annie Spratt
or
Do all derivatives of your application need to give credit? No. We know that if your application is used by users who then produce content with the photos, you can’t enforce them to always give credit. However, in the interfaces that you control, like for example, a search result of photos from Unsplash, credit can and is required to be given.
Why?
As the first contributors to Unsplash, we chose the Unsplash License to use CC0 (instead of similar licenses like CC BY or CC BY-SA) very purposefully because we know that in certain situations, it’s very hard to give credit.
While the Unsplash License doesn’t require credit to be given, uses of our API do.
In all of the current applications using the API, we’ve found that adding credit is an easy and do-able step. If you think that it will be prohibitively difficult to add credit, let us know and we’ll review the usage.
5. Do not abuse the APIs. Too many requests too quickly will get your access turned off.
This one is fairly straight-forward: don’t try to DDoS Unsplash.
We understand that sometimes you don’t have control over large spikes in traffic, but try to be pragmatic when coding usage of the API. For example, don’t run a CRON job that sends your 5k hourly requests in the span of 3 seconds.
