🎁 Unsplash Release: Brookes

This is everything the Unsplash team created in 6 weeks from June 11th to July 23rd. We hope you enjoy it.

We decided to name this release in honor of two of our favorite and most creative Unsplash contributors, Brooke Cagle and Brooke Lark. Brooke Cagle is famous for her stunning candid portraiture, and Brooke Lark has a distinctive flair for capturing gorgeous food photography. To both Brookes, thank you for inspiring us to create 🍾

🔍 The search continues

As we teased last update, Aaron, Bruno, Tim, and Roberta have been building Cervantes, a completely revised search system focused on a much larger metadata system, learning algorithms, experimentation, and speed.

During the last 6 weeks, we incorporated machine learning models for object detection and colour, keyword extraction from the 1M+ publicly curated community collections, and tested scoring algorithms. While the system isn’t available for public use yet, we’re aiming a public rollout in October.

🤫 We released Unporn for safe to use sexual subjects

With Unporn, Chris, Charles, Annie, and Mikael started a new collection of SFW images to enable safe creation around traditionally taboo sexual subjects.

As Mikael explains in Introducing Unporn: Safe images for sexual subjects:

Today, many sexual subjects considered “off-limits” have a growing need to be communicated. Our aim with Unporn is to enable every creator to visually express themselves no matter what subject they need to approach.

The collection is completely open to contributions from the community (just add the unporn tag) and we’ve seen a lot of really creative submissions already.

👀 New photo uploading sneak-peek

The upload process on Unsplash has remained exactly the same for the last 3 years. With our search team rethinking our metadata system, Kirill and Charles began rethinking the process of submitting to Unsplash.

We’re not done exploring yet, but we do have a few early designs we can share to give you ideas of what we’re thinking about. We’ll be introducing multiple uploads and a much faster upload process focused on fully leveraging our new AI metadata services.

🍎 An update regarding Unsplash for iOS

Olivier and Aaron have also been working to bring this same submission flow to Unsplash for iOS in the next major release. This requires adding support for authentication first, so they spent this roadmap building out the login, join, and reset password flows. On the design side of the iOS project, Kirill and Charles have been exploring ways to bring profiles to everyone on Unsplash. Here’s a sneak peak of the updated profile views.

🐎 Unsplash gets even faster

Continuing from last roadmap’s distributed HTML caching, Olly and Sami shifted their focus to improving the loading of assets to minimize the initial render time. Improving these metrics is really important to getting Unsplash in front of as many creators as possible, as Unsplash is accessed globally across many different quality connections and devices.

While this had a few detours, including swapping a number of webpack plugins and an upgrade of webpack from version 3 to 4, the final result was a huge improvement in start render time due to inlining of CSS, better chunk-splitting, and a reduction in CSS and JS bundle sizes.

📺 Unsplash for Apple TV adds timezones

Olivier pushed a handful of small updates to Unsplash for Apple TV, most notably adding the ability for the displayed photos to match your time of day. That means that in the morning, you’ll see photos of dawn, in the afternoon you’ll see bright skies, and at night you’ll see photos of dusk and dark skies.

🌄☀️🌙

👫 More from our team

• Bruno shared the inspiring story of his own experience gaining exposure through the internet and sharing openly in “Exposure is Useless”
• Steph & Andrew helped launch our new API integration with Square

• Sami released react-progressive-enhancement a React higher-order component that came out of our real-world need to solve common server side rendering problems over the last year. Sami also wrote up a helpful step-by-step guide explaining how he built it.
• Kirill and I added support for hiding photos from your photographer profile while still having the photos appear in searches and collections. You can access this in your account settings under ‘Manage Photos’
• Olly added support for server-side experimentation that is compatible with our distributed HTML caching, using a bucketing technique to preserve cache hits.
• Charles shared twenty of his favourite street photographers on Unsplash
• Annie shared the down low on submitting to Unsplash, giving a great overview of the process and how to maximize impact
• Olly wrote up how we test responsive images at Unsplash, including open-sourcing a small module to help you with your own testing
• Aaron rolled out a big improvement to overall API performance by removing heavily nested collection objects
• Olly and Charles updated the homepage to be the ‘Editorial Feed’, swapping the order of the old ‘New’ feed with the ‘Trending’ feed to give more visibility to the best daily submissions