I love good photos and especially like them when they are creative commons so I can attribute the original author. I tend to use Flickr which I have contributed to a lot because you can easily search across all the creative commons photos using this search link. Recently I came across unsplash and I was impressed and when I saw free and decided nope read that licence. Had a read and started using the photos with attribution in my blog and slides.
Recently I was alerted to the fact unsplash use to apply a creative common licence originally then changed them all to their own licence.
From wikipedia…
Before June 2017, photos uploaded to Unsplash were made available under the Creative Commons zero license, which is a public domain equivalent license and a waiver, which allowed individuals to freely reuse, repurpose and remix photos for their own projects. This was changed in June 2017, and photos are now made available under the Unsplash copyright license, which imposes some additional restrictions
What are these additional restrictions?
The Unsplash license prevents users from using photos from Unsplash in a similar or competing service. While it gives downloaders the right to “copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free, including commercial purposes, without asking permission from or providing attribution to the photographer or Unsplash” the Unsplash terms of service prohibit selling unaltered copies, including selling the photos as prints or printed on physical goods.
Before June 2017, Unsplash photos were covered by the Creative Commons zero license.
That sucks to be frank, feels like a platform play and although they now have the dataset on github for research purposes… Its seems the creative commons zero marked metadata is gone forever?