Unsplash
8.7M free-to-use photos with a free JSON API at 1,000 requests/hour
Unsplash is a library of 8.7 million photographs from 428.4k photographers, released under the bespoke Unsplash License: free for commercial and non-commercial use, no permission and no attribution legally required. Its developer API is free, covers search, single-photo and listing endpoints, returns full metadata (dimensions, dominant colour, EXIF, raw/full/regular/small/thumb URLs) and allows 1,000 requests per hour on the free tier. Official client libraries exist for JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, iOS and Android. It is the default source when a build needs real photographic imagery rather than placeholders.
npm install unsplash-jsReach for Unsplash when a page needs credible photographic imagery and you want it fetched programmatically — `npm install unsplash-js`, an access key, and you can search and drop in `photo.urls.regular` with on-the-fly resize and crop params baked into the URL. Three API rules bite in production and none of them are optional: you must hotlink the `photo.urls` values rather than rehost, you must attribute the photographer with a `?utm_source=<app>&utm_medium=referral` link, and you must ping `photo.links.download_location` on any download-like action or your production approval gets rejected. Do not build a wallpaper app or an unofficial Unsplash client on it — both are explicitly banned, and unmodified photos may not be resold.
Why it is here. It is the only stock photo library at this scale with a genuinely free, well-documented, machine-readable API, which makes it the one an agent can actually wire into a build.
- 8.7M photos
- free API at 1,000 req/hour
- no attribution legally required for the images
- official JS, PHP, Ruby, iOS and Android SDKs
- on-the-fly image resize params in every URL
Verified 2026-08-16. HTTP 200. https://unsplash.com, https://unsplash.com/license, https://unsplash.com/developers, https://help.unsplash.com/en/articles/2511245-unsplash-api-guidelines, https://registry.npmjs.org/unsplash-js (unsplash-js 8.0.1, MIT, published 2026-08-14)
