Visuals our community is looking for
On the Community team, the work we do really revolves around the Unsplash library, and, you guessed it — the community! So from manually sorting through thousands of submissions that are uploaded to Unsplash every day, to analyzing what you’re searching for — we do our best to understand the forever-evolving platform and everyone who uses it. Which means we’d like to think we have a pretty good understanding of what type of photography gets seen and downloaded the most, as well as what kinds of images are currently missing on Unsplash. And the answers might surprise you.
That's why we’ve put together a quick guide of topics to shoot that may help you increase they way the community interacts with your photos on Unsplash.
Trends
Our trends page showcases the spiking searches on Unsplash, which helps you understand what our community is looking for on any given day. Plus, you can search for any keyword to get a better understanding of how on trend it is.
This tool is a nice way to capture content that’s helpful for our community in real-time, which will in turn help bring visibility to your Unsplash profile. From current events in the news, to upcoming celebrations — much of the top trends on Unsplash reflect what’s going on in the world around us.
People & Diversity
A library that actively and accurately represents our entire community is really important to us, so we believe it’s important to bring awareness and inspire the community to challenge the norms of stock photography and media representation as a whole. So on your next shoot, remember to use your photography as a tool for good, and showcase the realities of the world around you in your work.
And when you do take photos featuring people, don’t forget to tag your photos with relevant tags to help our community find your images. For instance, tags relating to race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, location, and cultural background are all incredibly helpful for the community when they are searching for specific photos.
Emotions
Emotions like love, sadness, confused, attitude — are a few of the most popular searches on Unsplash. Yet evoking strong, genuine emotions in a photograph can also be quite tricky — which is why these types of images are extremely searched for and downloaded on the platform.
Need some specific emotions to experiment with? Here are a few to get you started: argument, questioning, appreciation, amazed, awkward, hopeless, rude, anxious, surprised, scared, nervous, annoyed.
Work, Work, Work
One of the top photo requests on Unsplash? Photos of real people working. Which means there’s an opportunity to showcase people in a range of different jobs — whether that’s telemarketing, bartending, construction, or remote working.
Show us the money
While photography is often about the art of turning abstract concepts into something tangible — sometimes it can be tricky. Terms like equity, investing, interest rate, and fundraising are difficult to visualize and therefore, a challenge to photograph.
Back to school
From kids in classrooms to adults learning to code, education takes on many forms. And it turns out, our community is regularly searching for images that reflect the authentic learning experience — like children playing in the school yard, college students in dorms, and kids being homeschooled.
We hope that this has served as a starting point to get you inspired and have a better understanding of what our community is searching for when they visit Unsplash. If you’re hungry for more photoshoot ideas, check out our recent post about beginner-friendly shoot ideas 0r 20 things to shoot inside.