Getty Images bought free stock photo service Unsplash


Yesterday, March 30, the developers of the Unsplash platform officially announced that the resource was acquired by Getty Images, which owns the largest photo bank in the world. According to statistics, the American company has over 200 million photos on a variety of topics, which now, apparently, will be supplemented by an arsenal of free stock photos from the Unsplash service. It is worth noting that after the completion of the transaction, nothing will change in the operation of the two services – they will remain independent and, in fact, will not interact with each other in any way. Anyway, representatives of Getty Images say so.

Moreover, the entire team of the free stock images service Unsplash will continue to work on the project, developing and improving it, and the platform remains absolutely free – no one plans to introduce a subscription, paid features or capabilities yet. On the other hand, Unsplash developers now have access to a variety of tools from a more experienced player in this market, which will take the library of visual resources to the next level. And representatives of the free photo stock said that they had been discussing a deal with Getty Images since 2016, worried that their project would also start selling paid content.

After making sure that this does not happen, the creators of the platform signed all the papers, but the company does not plan to disclose the amount of the transaction. It is worth recalling that Unsplash was launched in 2013 in the format of a blog on the social network Tumblr, and as of 2021, the service has 2 million free high-resolution images of various topics. At the same time, the active audience of the project is also constantly growing – the photos are viewed by 300 million people a month. However, in comparison with Getty Images, of course, these numbers look rather insignificant.

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