Until May of this year, Unsplash was a place to find and download beautiful images for my creations. But a sentence on the site struck me: why leave hundreds of images (beautiful and personal) on my hard drive? Let’s make them available to the world!
I was hooked: on June 3rd, I began my career as an Unsplash contributor.
And that’s when the surprises began. Big surprises.
Because the Unsplash system has statistics. Not much, in terms of analysis. But you can see the views, visitor downloads, and even where the photos were used. Not much. But discovering, after a couple of weeks, that the views of my photographs (about fifty at the time) were equal to 1,500 a day, more or less, was a surprise that left me breathless.
I was so surprised that I asked Mike Hindle (mikehindle.uk), who was writing about his experience on Unsplash, if the statistics were reliable or just randomly made-up numbers. He replied that he had no reason to believe they weren’t accurate and true.
The surprise was profound. Never, in my entire life as an amateur photographer, spanning more than forty years, had I ever seen such a response.
But then came August 4th: from 1,898 views (August 3rd), I went to 13,856. I was alarmed. I told myself it was a coincidence. I told myself that the beauty of statistics is that they go up and then crash back down.
But on August 5th, the statistics reported 101,000 views. In one day!
I panicked. Really, I was scared. Also because the vast majority of views were for a single image, this one:
For a month, August, I didn’t upload anything. Deep down, I thought, who knows why, the algorithm had caught this photo and was spreading it to everyone. I told myself it would calm down.
It didn’t.
Throughout August, my space continued to grow at a rate of 100,000 views a day. An Unsplash comment even appeared: you’re among the 1,000 most viewed contributors this month.
Deep down, I was afraid.
It’s true, I had published ‘useful’ photos; that is, a graphic designer, a blogger, a company could have used them. That’s what I’d been doing for the last twenty years as a marketing amateur photographer. I was a marketer who took photographs for my clients’ websites and social media.
But by 2025, I’d decided that photography, which had fascinated me for forty years, wasn’t “my path.” I’d cleaned up and thrown away hundreds of negatives and deleted thousands of digital photos. I was “done,” as they say. I’d hung up my cameras, both analog and digital. I’d closed my closets. And now, voilà, it’s all over again.
The doubt crept in: had I taken the wrong path? Had I been a photographer before I was a marketer, for years and years? Had I “done” just to make room and broaden my horizons?
Possible?
Crazy, but possible?
I don’t know, and I don’t think I’ll ever know.
In any case, it’s fun.
