❓Who are you and what’s your role at Unsplash?
I’m Chris, and I’m the Controller at Unsplash.

My role encompasses handling all things money-related with the company. That varies from smaller things like payroll, invoices and accounts payable, to larger projects like cash management, maintaining accounting standards, creating financial statements for our investors and being responsible for corporate taxes. With Unsplash being a small team, the finance side is really a one-man department that consists of yours truly 🙂

Lately I’ve also been trying my hand at helping the team in forming some great partnerships to make Unsplash even more accessible.

🏡 Where do you live?
I live in Montreal, strolling distance from Unsplash HQ. Being a traditional 26-year-old Italian boy, I live with my parents (one of which also works at Unsplash) and in the same building as my sister and brother in-law (both of which are co-founders of Unsplash).

🧮What’s your working background?
My first full-time job after I got my undergrad degree in accounting was as an accounting technician at an architecture company called Bleu Tech — which is a subsidiary company of a large multinational engineering corporation called Permasteelisa.

I enjoyed my time there and learned a lot, though it was short-lived as I left after two months when Crew (at the time a sister company to Unsplash) needed a full-time accountant. I officially became a full-time Unsplash teammate in April of 2016 and worked here while getting my CPA designation, which I finished in September 2017.

During my time at Bleu Tech I was still working part-time at Crew; in fact, I had been working part-time at Crew since we were still called Ooomf. Prior to Bleu Tech I worked as a concessions manager for both the Bell Center 🏒 and Molson Stadium 🏈 — basically ideal jobs for a college kid who loves sports.

👫What does a regular day at Unsplash look like for you?
No two days at Unsplash are ever the same. Like most accountants, my schedule gets pretty packed around period-ends (month-end, quarter-end, year-end). During the other stretches, I work on different projects with my teammates. Right now I’m working with Wyn Sutuntivorakoon on reaching out to API partners. Recently Luke Chesser and I worked on a large tax project together. Given that I’m the only accountant on the team, I tend to work solo unless there’s a specific project at hand.

⚙️ What tools do you use?
My toolbox consists of:

• Quickbooks Online for accounting
• Trello for organizing projects
• Slack for communicating
• Gmail and Google Calendar for organizing my life
• Spotify for inspiration

❤️ What is your favourite thing you worked on at Unsplash?
This is going to come across weird, but it’s Unporn and by a large margin. The day that Charles Deluvio told me about his idea, I thought it was genius. And being his photography quasi-protege, I had to get involved. The result was a lot of fun and a little embarrassment — there were more than a few photos that were even too NSFW for Unporn.

🎧 What do you like to listen to while you work?
One of my very favourite things to do is kick back, listen to John Mayer, and get some solid work done. I could listen to 10 hours of John all day, every day. But unfortunately the office sound system is hooked up to my Spotify, so I get around 5 hours of the best guitarist alive and 5 hours of whatever the office consensus is that day.

😛Favourite working snack?
I’m a big fan of fruit smoothies — they’re sweet, packed with vitamins, and I convince myself that they’re low in sugar. My freezer at home is packed with frozen fruit. Sadly we don’t have a blender at the office, so it’s really a working-from-home snack.

Happy Village Figs are my go-to office snack. When I’m craving that mid-afternoon snack, I’ll grab five or six of those figs and I’m good to go.

🍹 What do you do when you aren’t working on Unsplash? Hobbies / past-times…
This past year I’ve been learning the art of photography on my spare time. Luckily I work at Unsplash so I have some of the best inspiration out there. I actually struck a deal with Charles where he teaches me photography and I teach him accounting loopholes.

I still think I came out on top of that negotiation.

You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I’m also a big gym rat. I love being in my zone in the gym and working on being better than I was the day before.

🕵️‍ Where can people find you / chat to you?
My Twitter account is pretty lonely — I’m sitting pretty at 92 followers. So if you message me there I’m sure to write back.
You can view and download my photos here.

More about the team…

Meet the Unsplash team: Stephanie Liverani

Meet the Unsplash team: Charles Deluvio

Meet the Unsplash team: Annie Spratt

Meet the Unsplash team: Pina Messina

Meet the Unsplash team: Chris Liverani was originally published in Unsplash Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Lawrence Yeo

There’s a reason why the ever-present question, “What do you do?” is shorthand for “What do you do for work?”

It’s because the very act of work is universal, and is a concept that has unified humanity ever since the dawn of our existence. So asking what someone does for a living is often seen as an anchor point of dialogue that will reliably produce a response instead of an overwhelming silence.

But long, long before crowded bars, networking events, and millions of questions about the companies we work for, we were all nomadic beings, roaming around this planet gathering food and taking up temporary shelter in the harshest of climates.

During this time, work was a universal phenomenon across our entire species for a very simple reason:

If you didn’t work, you just kinda… died.

Work was a purely functional endeavor, as our survival directly depended upon the food we needed to hunt and catch for that very next meal. A lucrative career had nothing to do with selective promotions, bigger houses, or higher salaries. Instead, it meant that you were adept at hunting game, gathering fruits/nuts, hand-building shelter, harnessing the power of fire, and nurturing your young.

In other words, you were a successful human simply if you stayed alive.

Survival and reproduction were the only items on our collective job descriptions for a really, really long time, but things started to shift around 10,000 BC. In what is now known as the Agricultural Revolution, farming communities began to spring up across the world, with each region cultivating crops that were specific to their natural environments.

As agriculture spread and farming became the primary means of food production, people were finally able to settle down and stay in one area instead of roaming around from one place to another. And with this change, the nature of work fundamentally shifted as well.

While the nomadic lifestyle viewed work as a generalized endeavor, the agricultural society viewed work as something entirely different:

A series of specialized tasks.

This specialization of labor will eventually carry itself into the Industrial Revolution… but with a pretty significant twist. Whereas a farming community in 2,000 BC gauged the progress of work by the actions performed that day, a factory in the nineteenth century tracked productivity by the number of hours that were worked by its employees.

This introduction of time into the workforce was a significant development, and is something that most companies still use today as a leading measure of workforce productivity. In order to understand how this happened, let’s rewind a bit to the fourteenth century and place ourselves in the middle of a large European city during that time.

Okay, you see that clock tower in the background? Well, that thing should actually be in the foreground, as it’s the main character of the point I’m about to make.

According to English historian E.P. Thompson, the local merchant guilds of these major European towns funded the construction of these clock towers so its citizens would view time in the same way they did — as a valuable resource that could be counted, budgeted, and sold. The ability to slice up time into seconds, minutes, and hours changed the way people perceived it, and pretty soon time was viewed as a disposable commodity that could be bought and sold, just like money.

It’s no coincidence that the dissemination of domestic clocks and pocket watches happened in the late 1700s, which was also when the Industrial Revolution began and 10–16 hour work days soon became the norm. Since everyone was on this unified, fixed grid of time, factories would be able to tell its workers to show up by a very specific time, and everyone would reliably be able to do so. As employees punched the clock upon entering and leaving, they were quite literally leasing their time for money as their wages would be pegged by the hour.

This trend continued into the twentieth century, but with a slight revision whose echoes can still be heard in the conventional wisdom of today. In the 1920s, Henry Ford introduced the 5-day work week, with the requirement that people work 40 hours across five consecutive days, and rest up for two.

With this move, the culture of consumerism entered the workforce, as people sold their time for money, and then spent that money on the newfound leisure time of the 2-day weekend. The sale of one’s time via the 40-hour week became the way we defined our work, which represented a massive departure from any of the ways we viewed work in the past.

As the years went by, less and less people worked in factories, but the mentality of selling our time for money remained. Access to information continued to be controlled by only a few companies (for example, only three channels dominated television broadcasting in the U.S. for most of the twentieth century), and the production of goods still belonged in the hands of corporate monopolies and those with access to capital.

We traded in our workbenches for cubicles, but the work philosophies of the industrial age continued their reign.

But as society pressed onward, the seeds of yet another revolution were being planted — one that would fundamentally alter the way humans would interact and build things with one another. In the late 1970s, these little guys were starting to make their way into the walls of our homes:

The world’s first mass-produced home computers were starting to populate the United States, but for the most part, the people that owned them were simply trying to understand how they worked. In addition to doing some basic programming work on these intriguing machines, people also played some games, used them for word processing, and created some rudimentary spreadsheets on them as well. They were great for personal productivity and fun, but widespread information dissemination wasn’t a strong feature of these machines at the time.

But then of course… this little thing came along and changed everything.

With the introduction of the World Wide Web, the architecture of the internet was born. Each computer became an online node that would receive and distribute information to all other nodes in this growing web of knowledge, which became cheaper and cheaper to access as well. As more convenient mediums such as smartphones allowed more nodes to populate this web, our ability to communicate with one another grew at an unprecedented rate, and fundamentally changed the way we exchanged ideas and collaborated with one another.

Through the internet, what was once in the grubby hands of the few became accessible to the masses. As the bottleneck of information broke wide open, it became easier for us to learn about new ideas and discover platforms to share our own insights as well.

While the industrialized society focuses on brute productivity with the intention to scale, today’s connected society thrives when we create awesome things that can make an impact. The culture of innovation is not about leasing someone’s time and forcing them into a rigidly defined job position — no, it’s about collaborating with the best people you can find to build a role that will bring out their talents, interests, and abilities in the best possible light.

When you combine passionate, hard-working people with a unified belief in what they are building, the culture of innovation allows that work to be cultivated and spread amongst the masses. Creativity and innovation have reliably made their way to the forefront of why we work, and for the first time in our history, we can gauge our purpose of work by the favorable impact it has on others rather than the means of survival it provides for ourselves.

However, there is this common belief that viewing work through the lens of its meaning and impact is to do so with a sense of “entitlement.” People that believe this often tell others that they should just be happy to have a job, regardless of the mundaneness or purposelessness it brings about. One must learn how to work and spend their time doing things they don’t really care for to make money — after all, that’s “just the way the world works.”

While I understand where they are coming from, this argument reliably fails for the following reason:

When the landscape of “how” we work shifts, the “why” naturally follows as well.

Here’s a quick thought experiment:

If a caveman from 20,000 BC was transported to the industrial age and saw that he could now settle in one place without the fear of being eaten alive, he could now work a set period of hours a week to make money, he could buy groceries with that money to provide for his family, and to top it off, he actually had some leisure time to just chill out and relax, would it make sense for him to call this society “entitled” and instead go back to hunting animals on the street to show everyone what’s up?

No, that would be ridiculous — his environmental landscape has fundamentally shifted, so he no longer needs to view work as a sole means to stay alive and pass his genes on as soon as possible. Because a new way to work has been introduced, his adaptation to that fact will shift the reason why he works as well.

On its surface, our environment today may not look like it has changed much — we still have cities, roads, power lines, and other things that can be traced directly to the industrialized age. However, underneath the hood, the whole structure of human connectivity looks nothing like it did a hundred years ago.

We now live in a world where the pace of change is unprecedented — technological progress is moving at a rate where our predictions of the future sound more like science fiction than reality. In the twentieth century, it was okay to spend the first twenty-some-odd years of your life in school, and then dedicate the rest of your life to a set career path leading to predictable retirement benefits. Multiple decades’ worth of uniform, 40-hour workweeks in a singular line of work was the formula for individual success.

But in today’s world, we cannot afford such stagnation.

We need to use the tools of creativity and curiosity to constantly iterate on what we know, and reinvent ourselves in the process. The technological revolution has set our work’s purpose to create something that will positively impact the lives of others, and the only way to do this is to continuously update our understanding of the world at any given moment.

In his latest book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari sums up this point quite nicely:

“[I]n the twenty-first century, you can’t afford stability. If you try to hold on to some stable identity, job, or worldview, you risk being left behind as the world flies by you with a whoosh. Given that life expectancy is likely to increase, you might subsequently have to spend many decades as a clueless fossil. To stay relevant — not just economically but above all socially — you will need the ability to constantly learn and to reinvent yourself.”

The frustrating thing about conventional wisdom is that it lurks in the cultures of even the most forward-thinking companies today. Centuries-old work philosophies like standardized work hours, boss-to-worker relationships, and rigid corporate ladders are still prevalent in the technology giants of the modern world.

So regardless of where you work, it’s important to press pause during the workday and ask yourself a few questions.

Are you in an environment where self-directed, curiosity-driven work is highly sought after… or frowned upon?

Do you have the autonomy to work on the things that highlight your unique abilities, or are you forced to make something that fits the “company mold”?

Is creativity viewed as a cornerstone value necessary for growth, or is it seen as a disposable luxury that gets in the way of profit maximization?

As you take the time to ponder these questions, it’s important to see how your work life may or may not be aligned with the reality of what is possible today.

No one really knows what the world will look like a hundred years from now, so performing a quick, hundred-thousand-year zoom-out on the past is a good way of understanding where we are today. While the pillars of curiosity, creativity, and collaboration were major players through most of our collective existence, they will be the only things that can successfully navigate us through the ever-shifting landscape in front of us now. History’s greatest lesson is that change is the only constant, and these pillars will allow us to be on the right side of it as it happens.

So I leave you with a final question:

Are you in an environment that encourages and fosters those values?

If so, that’s awesome — keep pushing forward.

If not, then I encourage you to reflect on that. Perhaps now is a good time to think about what it means to work on something that brings out the best you have to offer.

Since how we work has fundamentally shifted, now is a good time to adjust why we do it as well.

Just remember that necessity — not entitlement — is the fuel behind this desire for meaningful and impactful change.

Note from the author, Lawrence Yeo: This post was created in collaboration with Unsplash. A few months ago I came across the thinking behind their wonderful hiring page, and the insightful ideas in it inspired the creation of this story.

Mikael Cho on Twitter

1/ @kirillz and I recently put up a new version of our hiring page: https://t.co/VSs7o53AJc It looks simple but we put a lot of thought into it. Here's some of the things we considered along the way. https://t.co/3cGfrqc4xc

Note from Mikael Cho, Co-Founder/CEO at Unsplash: Lawrence is an incredibly thoughtful creator. As soon as I saw his work, I was hooked. You can see what got us all excited about Lawrence on his site More To That. We hope you enjoyed this story.

The Evolution of Why We Work was originally published in Unsplash Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Celebrating the people powering the open photography movement

Throughout the year, the artistry that we get to witness on our platform is truly astounding. We see our contributors continue to push boundaries and capture incredible moments from around the world.

There are now over 750,000 photos in the growing Unsplash library! This display of talent and generosity in our community cannot go unrecognized.

The Unsplash Awards

And so, we’re excited to be kicking off the 2nd annual Unsplash Awards. This month-long celebration that recognizes the powerful impact the Unsplash contributors have made.

We’ve created 12 photography categories where we will feature the work of Unsplash contributors from November to December. For each category, we’ve invited a guest judge to help select the featured photos.

Official Judge: Estaban Arturo
Designer — Global Citizen
Esteban is a brand designer working with Global Citizen. He focuses on exploring how design can transcend across an organisation; from the conception of the business model, to how it can be leveraged to empower individuals. Over his career in marketing and design he has worked on projects with Target, The Clorox Company, Macy’s, STORY, Microsoft, Nickelodeon, Starbucks, and Global Citizen; refining their marketing strategies, defining their brands, and creating consumer centric experiences. The combination of his design expertise and his understanding of product-market fit gives him the unique ability to act on business trends with a creative approach.

Official Judge: Jakob Owens
CEO /Director — BuffNerds Media
Among other things Jakob is a Director/Creator/Entrepreneur based out of Los Angeles California. He is also the creator and owner of TheBuffNerds youtube channel which has accumulated over 250+ million views and 750K + subscribers.

Official Judge: Amy Feitelberg
Photography Art Director — Square
Amy is currently a photo art director at Square in San Francisco, CA, where she gets to create the visuals for a forward thinking company that enables entrepreneurship for all. Previous to her transition to the Bay, she was the photo director at Los Angeles magazine and Outside magazine in Santa Fe, NM before that. Throughout her tenure in publishing she curated, produced and art directed award winning photography all over the world.

Official Judge: Rogie King
Lead Product Designer— Dribbble
Rogie is a multidisciplinary designer at Dribbble. He really loves to focus on unique solutions, crafted at the hand of front-end web tech that dazzle and delight. Oh, and community. He loves community. But also, hot-sauce! And horror movies! And really loud electronic music! And he loves to dabble in art, that he’s been told has a Disney/mid-century vibe.

Official Judge: Sai De Silva
Creative Director & Founder — Scout The City
Sai is an online destination that focuses on family, fashion, beauty, health, and all things lifestyle. The STC brand is devoted to the millennial mom who balances her career with motherhood through family bonding and unapologetic self-expression. Through our various media platforms we’ve created a conversation that resolves around parenting, fashion, city life, and celebrating diversity. STC has earned international credibility as one of the world’s favorite lifestyle blogs, gaining major recognition with national and international sponsors, advertisers, and a rapidly growing fan base.

Official Judge: Tobias van Schneider
Co-founder — Semplice
Tobias is an award-winning designer born in Germany, raised in Austria and currently living in New York. Working at the intersection of product design and brand identity, he’s had the privilege of creating products used and loved by millions. He writes about productivity and portfolio building on his blog, DESK. Find him @vanschneider on Twitter.

Official Judge: Andre Felipe Ribeiro
Design Manager — Squarespace
Andre Ribeiro is a Brazilian-born designer, now based in New York City. With more than 15 years of experience, he has worked at agencies in Brazil, London, San Francisco, and New York. He is currently a Design Manager at Squarespace and prior to that, Andre was a Senior Art Director at Huge Inc, working for a variety of clients such as Apple, Nespresso, Google, and Morgan Stanley, among others.

Official Judge: Joel Tellier
Design Director — VICE
Joel is a multifaceted artist with over 15 years of experience in design and animation. He is the Design Director at VICE Canada.

Official Judge: Kate Allchin
Content Marketing Manager — Pinterest
Kate is a London based editorial strategist and marketeer, with over 10 years experience working in fashion, interiors and now tech. She is Pinterest’s Content Marketing Manager — for Canada, UK and Ireland. She oversees the editorial direction for the curated spaces on Pinterest — as well as trend forecasting, co-marketing initiatives and their UK awards program. Outside of Pinterest she loves design, travel and wellness. All passions she can indulge, discover and do via Pinterest.

Official Judge: Emanuel Sá
Co-founder — Sketch
Emanuel is a designer and the co-founder of Sketch. Before starting Sketch in 2010 he worked with some of the biggest software companies in the world and when he’s not designing icons and interfaces, he’s taking pictures with his trusty Leica.

Official Judge: Wesley Yendrys
Creative Technologist — SSENSE
Wesley is a multidisciplinary designer currently working at the intersection of design, engineering and content at SSENSE. Responsible for merging both the creative and technical, he works to provide innovative yet concrete solutions that are technology based. On the side, he can be found working on a range of freelance projects across numerous creative domains, from branding and identity, to print, wayfinding and more.

Nominate someone!
This year, we’re opening up the Unsplash Community Award to the entire community. We want to hear from you who you think should be recognized for their stand-out involvement in the Unsplash community.

Nominate an Unsplash Community member by filling out this form.

Ready to submit your photos? Here is how you can participate :

1. From the Unsplash Awards website, select the category that you’d like to participate in and tap the Submit a photo button.
2. Select up to 3 photos (note: only photos that were uploaded in 2018 will be visible).
3. Press the Save button to save your selection. You can come back and edit/update your selection at any time until December 7th.

Nov 15th — Dec 7th: Submissions open. To have your photography featured in a category, go to awards.unsplash.com.

Dec 10th — Dec 14th: Curator selections

Dec 17th: Announcement of featured photos

Unsplash Partners

In support of the spirit of the open photography movement and the Unsplash community, we are so proud to have the following partners participating in the celebration of the Unsplash Awards:

Thank you!

Unsplash would not exist without the collective community of people who believe that sharing their work in support of creativity is worthwhile.

If you’d like to show your support for the people who make Unsplash possible, feel free to share this tweet:

Unsplash on Twitter

The #UnsplashAwards are back 🎉 We're celebrating the talented and generous contributors who make Unsplash possible and help move creativity forward ❤️ https://t.co/Zez6N6syzv

If you’d like to submit a photo to one of the categories, go to awards.unsplash.com

To every member of the Unsplash community, thank you for everything. 🙌

Unsplash Awards 2018 was originally published in Unsplash Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

❓Who are you and what’s your role at Unsplash?
I’m Annie and I’m part of the Community and Editorial team 👋

🏡 Where do you live?
I live in the beautiful New Forest, England 🇬🇧 We’ve a lot of these and these roaming freely around the countryside so I’m never short of things to take photos of.

Where do you work?
I work remotely from my home in the New Forest, UK.

My role at Unsplash suits my personal life as I can work hours to fit in with my family.

I don’t find remote working lonely as I’m usually online chatting with the team or the community every day.

👫 When did you join the team?
I joined the team at the start of 2016.

I’d been contributing photos to Unsplash for a couple of years before that and spotted Mikael Cho had tweeted looking for someone to manage the Unsplash social accounts so I got on it like bonnet and applied right away.

It was super interesting to see Unsplash ‘from both sides’, contributor and part of the team. I remember being blown away at just how hard everyone is working behind the scenes and thinking how if everyone knew just how much consideration and discussion goes into every part of Unsplash, they would really connect with and value it even more.

Hopefully our Medium articles and avid team tweets are helping people to get to know the whole team a little better and how passionate we all are about the community.

Yep, and I’m rambling 🙈, next question…

📷 What are your responsibilities / What does a regular day at Unsplash look like for you?

Usually I go through all the submitted photos daily, selecting some to feature on our homepage new feed and in keyword searches. When I first started in 2016 we saw around 400–500 coming in daily and now it’s around 1,500 a day. This Editorial selection takes up the biggest chunk of my working day.

It’s also the favourite part of my day — I get to see some amazingly diverse photography daily, it’s a beautiful thing!

I also cover the Support inbox, events scheduling and general community managing shizzle. I also work on special projects as and when needed.

👫 Who do you primarily work with within the team?
Day to day I work mostly with Andrew Neel and Stephanie Liverani, though our internal teams often overlap so I usually speak (I say ‘speak’ I mean ‘Slack’) most of the team every week.

Sometimes it’s work related, like checking in on something with Luke Chesser and other times it’s trolling Charles Deluvio and Kirill Zakharov over their fear of dolls…

Annie Spratt on Twitter

Job Title: Community Manager at @unsplash Hobby: Trolling my workmates 😘 this one's for you @kirillz + @deluvio Bonus points if you can spot which one most reminds me of Kirill 👏 https://t.co/qDqyMRgIwc

❤️ What is your favourite thing you worked on at Unsplash?
The searchable state aka ‘sneaky search’.

Ok so it wasn’t an official thing initially. We used to give photos one of 3 states; flagged, approved and promoted. One day I found a ‘pleasantly surprising hack’ that enabled me to make a photo ‘searchable but not promoted’. An in-between ‘approved’ and ‘promoted’ state.

I mentioned this to the dev team whilst we were all on a team retreat, showing them the searchable hack. It was then built into the product to become a feature which has made a really positive difference to the visibility of lots of fellow contributors photos.

Here’s a really quick example of how adding the ‘searchable’ state helped the visibility of photos:

The year is 2016. Bob submits 10 good quality photos of the same bowl of popcorn, all slightly from different angles. Because all promoted photos appeared in the New feed we would not have promoted all 10 photos, because they would have dominated the feed. So one or two of the strongest photos from the set would be promoted, and the other 8 would be approved. Approved means they would be discoverable only from Bobs profile, not via search — only promoted photos were made searchable.

Fast forward and the year is 2018. Bob submits 10 good quality photos of the same bowl of popcorn, all slightly from different angles. We would likely feature a couple on our homepage feed of curated new photos, and the other 8 would be made ‘searchable’, meaning they would all be searchable and therefore visible to more people.

⚙️ What tools do you use?
- Slack for team and community communication
- Trello and Paper for organisation
- Dropbox for managing photos and files
- Lightroom for all things photo editing
- Medium for sharing our team articles
- Ommwriter for distraction free writing
- Newton to manage my emails — though it’s closing soon so if you have any good alternatives please do let me know!
- My iPhone timer. Stephanie Liverani put me onto the pomodoro technique and I find I am way more productive when I work to it. I pimped it to suit me but essentially I split my working day into ‘bursts’. I work for 20 minutes then take a 10 minute break throughout the day, and every 4 ‘sets’ I take 20 minutes break. It keeps me focused (because I am huge procrastinator).

🎧 What do you like to listen to while you work?
When I am having a creative lull and need a motivational pick-me-up I tend to turn to listening to podcasts as I work. A few of my regular favourites are:

1. Me and Orla for all things Instagram + creativity
2. Elizabeth Carins for relaxation
3. Akimbo by Seth Godin, about our culture and how we can change it

When I am going through photo submissions I listen to stuff like Idles, High Contrast, James Blake, Gwenno, Juniore and A Tribe Called Quest.

In the Winter I tend to gravitate to the woodburner and binge listen to Netflix and Now TV boxsets as I work, favouring ones with a huge back catalogue of series. Last Winter I took on Grey’s Anatomy…

So yeah, if you have any boxset recommendations ahead of this Winter hit me up.

🥜 Favourite working snack?
Anything with peanut butter in or on it.
Porridge with a spoonful of peanut butter mixed in.
Peanut butter on toast.
Sneaky spoonful of peanut butter from the jar.
You get the idea…

🍹 What do you do when you aren’t working on Unsplash? Hobbies / past-times…
Spending time with my family and taking photos + travelling. This year I made an unofficial New Years resolution to learn all the technical side of photography that I don’t know. I enrolled on a few workshops and retreats that I knew would challenge and push me throughout 2018 and it’s just been the best year that I’ve had in a long time.

It’s super easy when you are a parent to put your own aspirations on hold and to put others first — but I’ve discovered this year the power of putting yourself first once in a while!

🕵️‍ Where can people find you / chat to you?
Unsplash
Slack @ annie-admin
Twitter
Instagram
Pinterest

More about the team…

Meet the Unsplash team: Stephanie Liverani

Meet the Unsplash team: Charles Deluvio

Meet the Unsplash team: Annie Spratt was originally published in Unsplash Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Who are you and what’s your role at Unsplash?
Graphic designer at Unsplash

Where do you live?
Montreal, QC

What’s your working background? You might like to share where you have worked previously, or the type of work you have done prior to Unsplash.
I studied Design at Concordia University & communications at Vanier College. I’ve had the opportunity to work with a few startups here in Montreal as a Web Designer (Frank & Oak & Crew), and Art Director (Deux Huit Huit, Dose & Cook it).

When did you join the team?
I joined the team in Spring 2017.

What are your responsibilities / What does a regular day at Unsplash look like for you?
I’m in a somewhat unique position at Unsplash because I was a huge fan of the platform even before getting the opportunity to join the team. It was (and still is) my go-to site for all things photography. As a visitor, collector and contributor to the platform, I’m able to design for a product that I enjoy and consume. Together with the product team, every new week is an opportunity to challenge the way we consume content on Unsplash and create features that would improve the browsing experience.

Charles Deluvio on Twitter

@_violetparadise @unsplash The process would be much simpler if we had a batch uploading feature in submissions, amirite? 😏

I also work closely with the Community team. I especially like to get involved in projects where we’re able to reward those of us in the community. I’m able to feature select photographers on the editorial feed, get in touch with those who reach important milestones via newsletters, provide new photo content for popular search terms, and even answer some of the questions the community may have regarding the platform via our community slack group. Whatever I’m working on at Unsplash, I always try to make it worthwhile for the community.

Who do you primarily work with within the team?
Designers at Unsplash are in a unique position as we get to work with pretty much everyone. I actually find it funny sometimes when my teammates are hesitant to reach out to the designers by fear of being a bother. We actually don’t mind helping out!

But if I had to name one person in the team that I work with the most, that’d be Kirill.

Why do you enjoy working on Unsplash?
Unsplash has been very useful for me in the past: It was that one place you could get high-quality images to use for any project. Since joining Unsplash, I’ve become a contributing member to the Unsplash library, and it’s now one of those sites that I visit regularly.

I love building for us users. I love that Unsplash is simple, easy to use. It forces us to make things uncomplicated. It’s also a place of respect (we put 100% trust in the people we collaborate with). But we’re not scared to challenge each other when it comes to what we do outside of the workplace (soccer, CrossFit & life choices lol).

We’re also very fortunate to get to work with people who are not from the city so whenever we get the chance, I love organizing activities outside of the workplace, discover new places in the city and ultimately, get to know the people we work with.

What tools do you use?
I use Dropbox paper for scoping projects.
I use Trello for tracking progress on some of our projects.
We have our internal team Slack for discussions & the community Slack to get in touch with Unsplash contributors.
I use Sketch to create mockups; Marvel to develop prototypes.
I use some of Adobe’s products. (Photoshop lulz).
We use Dropbox for hosting all of our files.
Also shout out to Grammarly, JPEGmini & VSCO.

What is your favourite thing you worked on at Unsplash?
I like to think of us on the team as part of the Unsplash community so any project that revolves around rewarding the community in some creative way is my favorite thing to work on at Unsplash. With over 90,000+ photographers and over 580,000+ photos, it can get hard to give everyone the exposure they deserve on the platform. One of those projects we were able to do was the Unsplash Awards which allowed us to feature the most deserving photographers on Unsplash. We invited some of the industry’s top people to judge different categories and reward the winners with awesome prizes. There have been talks of bringing it back this year; we hope that we’ll be able to make this year’s edition even better.

Where do you work?
I’ll split my time between home (with my dog Toshi) & the Unsplash workspace in Old Montreal.

Charles Deluvio on Twitter

Woouf. Wouuf. /end meeting

What do you like to listen to while you work?
I like to listen to what I refer to as low-fi chill. Artists I enjoy: Real Estate, Wild Nothing, Beach Fossils, Bombay Bicycle Club, DIIV, Beck, RY X…

I’ve been listening to lots of classical music lately: Alexandra Streliski, Nils Frahm, Goldmund…

Favorite Montreal artists in the afternoon: Patrick Watson, Arcade Fire, Half Moon Run, Daniel Bélanger, Jimmy Hunt, Louis-Jean Cormier, Ariane Moffatt.

For when I’m falling asleep: The War On Drugs (Red Eye)

The classic: Neil Young (Harvest)

And Kanye West.

Favourite working snack?
I’ll have a craving for cookies in the afternoon… anything with chocolate.
And an afternoon tea, or soup.

What do you do when you aren’t working on Unsplash? Hobbies / past-times…
Constantly thinking of new ideas and buying domain names. Current hobbies include digitizing old souvenirs (VHS tapes, family photos from when we were younger), photoshopping things and exploring print design. Things I wish I did more of: exploring, learning, writing, reading.

Where can people find you / chat to you?
I’ll share my every day on Instagram. I like to share some of my design work on Dribbble. I’m also on Twitter. I also want to write more, so that’ll be on Medium.

Meet the Unsplash team: Charles Deluvio was originally published in Unsplash Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Tell us about yourself

I’m Steph, and I’m one of the co-founders at Unsplash. I lead the Partnerships and Community team. I live in Montreal, only a short walk from Unsplash’s HQ in Old Montreal.

I graduated from university with a degree in Actuarial Mathematics and Finance, which is a field that deals heavily with risk analysis. Actuaries provide statistical probabilities of future events occurring — you usually see them working in financial markets or pension funds.

After graduating, I worked at a life insurance firm for a little over a year. It was an interesting experience, but not one I can say I particularly enjoyed. I always had an itch to work on something different; more creative. Something that would allow me to solve problems in a unique way, without conforming to traditional ways.

So in 2012, Mikael Cho and I quit our jobs to start our own company together. We met Luke Chesser in 2013, and through a few twists and turns, Unsplash was born.

A day at Unsplash

A day at Unsplash is never the same. Because I lead the Partnerships and Community side, I spend time sharing Unsplash with some of the most influential and creative partners in the world. This includes partners who are looking to integrate with Unsplash’s API, or who want to use Unsplash’s platform to share their product with our community of millions of influential creatives worldwide.

Lucky for me, I also get to spend a lot of time with both Andrew and Annie from the Community team. We work on projects that help nurture and grow Unsplash’s global community of over 90k+ contributors.

My day-to-day allows me to work with most of the Unsplash team, but I primarily spend more time with Mikael (co-founder), Luke (co-founder), Annie (community), Andrew (community), Kirill (designer), and Deluvio (designer).

⚙️ Tools used

My toolbox consists of Trello (for project management), Slack (for communicating), Dropbox Paper (for documenting and scoping), and the Be Focused app (to break up my tasks into smaller 25-min intervals).

🗺 Location

You would usually find me at the Unsplash HQ in Montreal. But when I’m not there, I’m either working from home with Mikael (we’re married!) and our chow chow, Nala, or meeting with partners in New York and San Francisco.

🎧 What do you like to listen to while you work?

It really depends on the day, and what I’m working on.

For creative work, I’m into Bon Iver, Dustin Tebbutt, Sleeping At Last, Nathan Ball, Vance Joy, A R I Z O N A.

For quicker tasks, I’m into Kanye, Eminem, Dr. Dre.

🥑 Favourite working snack?

I’m not the foodie-type, so you’ll find me eating similar meals more or less everyday. As long as it’s healthy, and doesn’t contain dairy or meat, I’m happy.

Here are some of my go-to’s:

Morning:

• Decaf coffee, with oat milk
• 2 scrambled eggs with grilled onion, grilled portobello mushroom, half an avocado, and a side salad
• Vegan Protein shake with Spirulina (on days I’m working out)

Lunch:

• A salad with grilled mixed mushroom, a handful of kale, and a hard-boiled egg.
• A chickpeas soup with vegetables.
• A salmon fillet with a side order of grilled or steamed vegetables.

Snacks:

• Dark chocolate
• Beanitos
• Pegan Thin Protein Bars
• Chai tea, with steamed oat milk

🚲 What do you do when you aren’t working on Unsplash?

I love the outdoors and being active. One of my favourite things I enjoy doing with Mikael is discovering a city’s hidden gems — those unusual attractions or quirky sites. We can spend hours bike riding through the city and exploring the different shops, architecture, restaurants, and history.

When we’re not on an adventure, we’re cross-training 3x a week, playing soccer, and spending time with family and friends.

🔎 Find Stephanie at…

Unsplash
Slack @steph-admin
Twitter
Instagram
Medium

And finally…😂

Unsplash Fun

A collection of fun moments with the Unsplash Team.

Meet the Unsplash team: Stephanie Liverani was originally published in Unsplash Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Table of Contents

• Advice for photographers
• Optimize your profile
• Understanding our submissions process and how we feature photos
• Frequency of submissions
• Photographic quality

Introduction

👋Annie here from the Community team, hello!
I’m in a rather unique position using Unsplash. Not only do I contribute weekly, but also I’m part of the Unsplash Editorial Team. Since I joined the team at the start of 2016 I’ve completely changed the way that I use Unsplash as a photographer now that I understand the process from both sides.

In this article I’m going to be sharing what I’ve discovered and giving advice and insight for photographers submitting to Unsplash to give the best chance of exposure, being featured socially and giving your photos the best chance of being discoverable and curated in our homepage Editorial Feed. The homepage Editorial Feed is the feed of handpicked, beautiful new photos and updates daily.

One of the great things about sharing your photography on Unsplash is that it’s easy. There’s no algorithms or optimum scheduling to try to master, no need to comment on photos and follow others to build your own visibility — it’s simply about the photography. The content speaks for itself, and the content is evergreen.

But if you are one of those people who likes to optimize everything, this article shares some easy things that you can do to make the most of your Unsplash profile.

Optimize your profile

As a photographer, your Unsplash profile is not only a sign of your generosity to the creative community but a portfolio. With that in mind, it’s savvy to optimise it to best suit your individual needs.

Add a url — You can only choose one so make it count. Where do you want people to click through to? Your website? Your online store? Blog? Portfolio? Instagram profile? A page where people can donate to support your work?

Add contact details — You profile supports messages by default (you can enable or disable this at https://unsplash.com/account when logged in to your account).

You can also add your email address or social tags to your profile, if you would like people to be able to reach you.

Freelancer? Available to hire? Have an epic print store? Tell people! — Add that in your profile. We’ve heard from photographers who have received paid work as a direct result of their Unsplash profile.

Understanding our submissions process and how we feature photos

Familiarising yourself with our submission guidelines will help you understand what will and won’t be accepted (and may save you time!)

At we receive thousands of photo submissions daily. Every photo submitted is given one of 4 states:

Unevaluated — This is the first state that all photos automatically receive upon submission. Unevaluated is a temporary state, given to a photo until it’s been assessed. A photo maybe unevaluated for anywhere between 24–36 hours, and on occasions where we experience exceptionally high volume of submissions this may be longer.

Flagged — This is an automatic state. Photos that do not meet our guidelines will be removed and an email will be sent out to explain why.

Searchable — This is a manual state, how searchable a photo is determined by how the community interacts with the image along with a confidence score (you can read more about that below).

Promoted — This is a manual state. Our Editorial Team features a selection of their choice of best quality photos on Unsplash to highlight to the Unsplash Community. These photos will be discoverable and also highlighted in our homepage Editorial Feed.

If your photo is featured on the homepage you’ll receive an email notification, unless you have opted out of ‘Milestones & Notification’ emails in your account’s Email Settings.

What we’re changing!

We know that search must rely on a minimum quality and utility threshold, as experiments have repeatedly validated that our community doesn’t want to search through thousands of mixed quality results each time they search.

To address this we’ll be splitting search results into two sections: a high confidence section and a less confident section.

In the less confident section, we’ll include results that have a lower relevancy score. This will translate into photos that might match the search query or are less used (indicating that they may not be as high quality). By default, the results will only show the high confidence section. For searchers who want to see all results, they’ll be able to click a button or toggle to show the lower confidence results.

Photos that outperform their expected use for their relative position in the results will increase their relevancy and move out of the ‘less confident’ section. This is very similar to the process used to rank results in other search systems (like Google and Pinterest), as it’s possible to predict the mathematical relationship between the position in a search list and the expected engagement.

Please note: Because of the high volume of photo submissions, we are unable to give feedback on individual photos. However, we have an active Slack community with a #feedback channel where you can ask for feedback from the wider Unsplash community if you wish. You can join this community at chat.unsplash.com.

Frequency of submissions

Initially, when you open an Unsplash account you are limited to uploading a maximum of 10 photos, every 10 days, however unlimited photos can be unlocked for special contributors.

One questions that we are often asked is ‘When’s the best time to submit my photo?’

Any time is a good time.

Photos are usually assessed for curation and discoverability by the Editorial Team within 24 hours, however this time may be slightly longer if there’s a higher than average number of submissions.

It doesn’t matter how many photos you submit at one time. For example, if you choose to share a set of 8 portrait shots in one go, all beautiful, high quality images, this doesn’t mean that only one or two are likely to be curated. In cases where a set of curation-worthy photos are shared at once, we may choose to drip feed these into the curated Editorial Feed over a few days. This assures the feed remains diverse and your exposure is spread over time. 💪

Photographic quality

The sky’s the limit when it comes to the subject of a photo that can be submitted to Unsplash (literally in some cases).

Currently there are thousands of photos submitted daily and the standard levels are high. People use Unsplash to source high quality photography, and one of the things that keeps people coming back, time and time again, is that they know that they can discover beautiful and creative photography of a high standard.

NB: Best avoided: selfies, people ‘holding the sun’ 😖

There are three common reasons why photos aren’t selected to be promoted — and the good news is they can all be avoided. 👍

• Spotting. This is by far the most common reason a photo won’t make it to being promoted. Small spots of dust, dirt or water marks that were on the lens at the time the photo was taken. These are often most noticeable in large areas of blank color, such as sky. These can be removed in post-processing using the heal or clone tools in Lightroom, Photoshop or your preferred photos editing app.
• Wonky horizons. Distinctive horizons that aren’t level. This can be remedied using the straighten tool in Lightroom, Photoshop or your preferred photos editing app.
• The photo could benefit from cropping. Check for objects in the photo that distract the viewer, if there’s a guy in the corner of the photo bending over showing some butt crack, it’s best cropped out. 🍑🙈

I’ll keep this article updated, if you would like to suggest something the you would like added or covered that isn’t already drop me a message in our Slack Community at chat.unsplash.com. I’m @annie-admin over there, come say hello!

📷 Unsplash Submissions 101 was originally published in Unsplash Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Examples
• Installing the presets
• Download

Introduction

👋 Annie here from the team — hello!
One of the (many) things I love about our Unsplash Slack community is the creative discussion. Timothy Rose had a great idea recently that creators could get together and make a collaborative Lightroom Preset pack, to be sent out to our community via email and our social channels.

As a team we appreciate our communities generosity, without wanting to ‘ask for more’. We chatted within the Community team and decided to trial the idea by releasing a small set of Lightroom Presets ourselves first. This way we can gauge interest and if others in the community are keen to join forces to create future presets packs.

This set of 3 Lightroom presets was inspired by my recent trip to the Faroe Islands and general love of nature. If you end up using them I’d love to see — I’m @anniespratt everywhere. 🙋🏻‍

Examples

№1 Bleached, №2 Natural, №3 Rich Warmth

As with most Lightroom presets, you might find that you need to adjust the exposure levels in the basic editing settings. These can be used as stand alone presets or as a base to tweak and create your own.

Installing the presets

Installing the presets in Lightroom CC

1. Open Lightroom CC
2. Click on the Preset Develop icon
3. Click Presets
4. Click the … icon
5. Select ‘Import Presets’
6. Select the files and hit ‘Import’ 💪

Installing the presets in Lightroom Classic CC

1. Open Lightroom Classic CC
2. Go to the Develop tab
3. In the Presets tab, on the left hand side, click the + icon, then ‘Import Presets’
4. Select the files and hit ‘Import’ 💪

Adobe have recently updated Lightroom, and have replaced the old .lrt files with .xmp files. This change will mean that if you are installing to Lightroom Classic CC the presets will end up in the ‘User Presets’ folder, as opposed to their own folder.

Download

To download the presets please click here

Get involved

Interested in sharing some presets with the community? Get in touch for a chat! Email support@unsplash.com or drop me a message in the Unsplash Slack community, I’m @annie-admin there. ✌️

Finally a huge thank you to Nik, Josh and Jilbert for helping me navigate and test the murky waters of Lightroom’s recent updates. 🙌

Unsplash Lightroom Presets was originally published in Unsplash Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Unsplash Community is full of people of all ages, from all walks of life, sharing and using photography creatively. In short, it’s an awesome thing to be a part of.

It’s really important for everyone that as our community grows, it remains a positive and respectful space for people to share their creative work and ideas, making new connections along the way (aka be nice and don’t spam).

These Community Guidelines lay out some basic ways we can achieve this together.

Table of Contents

• Usernames
• Names
• Bios
• Collections
• Image descriptions
• Messaging
• Slack

Usernames

Username allocation is on a first-come first-served basis. If a username that you want is already taken we suggest that you try using underscores or numbers to create a variation. Some members of our community use Unsplash to create private collections of photos, so while an account may seem dormant, it can be active.

We reserve the right to reclaim an account’s username if:

• An account has contributed 0 photos and is inactive* for 12 or more months
• An account has contributed 1 or more photos and is inactive for 24 or more months.
• An account is using a trademarked brand name as a username.

Accounts that have had their username reclaimed will be given the same username followed by a random 3-digit number (e.g. “@nike” becomes “@nike354”).

Accounts that have had their username reclaimed will be notified via email and informed as to why their username was reclaimed: inactivity or trademarked brand username.

*An inactive account is an account that has not been logged into.

Names

Your name will be credited to your photos both on Unsplash.com, our apps, and via third party extensions using our API. To avoid confusion we ask that you:

• Only use your chosen name, not mentions of websites and social accounts — these can be added in your profile bio area.
• Do not include a url in your name.
• Refrain from using trademarked brand names. These will be removed if requested, without notice.
• Do not add @ tags
• Do not impersonate someone else.

Bios

This is the place to tell everyone about yourself. Share who you are and what you do. Highlight what makes you special or inspires you to take photos. Let people know you’re available for hire. It can also be a great place to direct people to your bio link. Some possible uses:

• Personal website
• Your Instagram, YouTube, or other social accounts
• Print shop
• Donate link

Please refrain from using derogatory language and profanity in your bio.

Handy reading: Advice on creating an effective profile

Collections

Collections are ways to save and order photos on Unsplash. You can create as many collections as you’d like. Many people use collections to save photos for future use or for inspiration. Find out more about Collections here.

Notifications are sent to a photographer when one of their photos is added to a collection, so please respect the photographers and models when giving a title and description to a collection.

Collections which cause offence will be removed from Unsplash immediately and an email to explain why will be sent out to the creator of the collection.

To flag a collection to the Unsplash Team, please drop us an email at support@unsplash.com.

Handy reading: Everything you need to know about collections

Image descriptions

Descriptions are a way for a photographer to share information about photo’s — and also gives a boost to a photo’s search-ability. Added upon submission, or later via the Edit modal, stories can be viewed beneath any photo in single photo view.

We have a few simple guidelines for titles and stories, and some tips to help you maximize your chances of being featured:

• Descriptions are something we reference when selecting photos to feature on our own social channels; Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
• Please don’t specify mandatory crediting for photo use as this goes against The Unsplash License and causes confusion for our community.
• Please avoid using derogatory language and profanities.
• Hashtags added to a story will not be searchable, and look a little funky, so these are best avoided.
• No spam please! Do not copy and paste the same message multiple times or add spammy links to stories — these will be removed without notice.

Here are some examples of how people are sharing stories on Unsplash:

Handy reading: Editing your photo

Messaging

The option to message fellow Unsplash members is available on profiles, unless the member has chosen to opt out of the feature.

Here’s our recommended best practices when it comes to sending a message:

• The Unsplash Community is made up of great people — please keep the tone of messages polite and respectful. 🙏
  Users sending inappropriate or offensive messages will have their accounts locked without notice.
• Aim to send a message with a minimum of 20 words. Messaging is a great way to make meaningful connections within the Unsplash community, so please avoid short interactions like ‘hi!’ or ‘nice pics’. Messages with less than 20 words are likely to get flagged as spam and may not be sent.
• No spam please! Do not copy and paste the same message multiple times to multiple users — these will get flagged as spam and not sent.

Users that repeatedly break these guidelines risk having their account locked.

Slack

We have an engaged and lively Slack community at chat.unsplash.com, which is open to the whole Unsplash community.

To ensure the smooth running and happy vibes of the community:

• Please refrain from ‘link dropping’. For feedback on photos, feel free to add a link in the #feedback channel and include some context for what kind of feedback you’re looking for. And when providing feedback on photos, please be helpful, not mean.
• Derogatory and offensive language have no place in the Unsplash community, so please keep your words and tone polite and respectful. Basically, play nice 🤗
• Please don’t spam or disrupt.

Unsplash Community Guidelines was originally published in Unsplash Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Host Profiles is a series of interviews with members of the Unsplash community who arrange and host events in their local areas, bringing together the online community in the offline world.

Host

Klaus Tan

Unsplash Account

https://unsplash.com/@chuttersnap

Profession

Student, designer, photographer and filmmaker

Tell us about yourself

I’m an 18 year old photographer based in Singapore. Much of my work involves cityscapes and drone photographs and my style is one that’s striking and definitive. I’m the 2nd largest contributor to Unsplash (second to Annie Spratt) and the 7th most viewed photographer on Unsplash last year, currently at 200,000,000+ views.

Previously Asia’s only Unsplash Ambassador (until the Unsplash Host system was introduced)!

Shooting on

I’m shooting on anything Nikon at the moment — the D5, D810, D750 along with a fleet of Nikon primes (14mm f2.8, 50mm f1.2, 85mm f1.4, 300mm f4 PF). And of course, the DJI Mavic for a different perspective.

What do you love about living in Singapore?

Everything in Singapore is convenient and easily accessible by public transport — it won’t take more than 90 minutes to travel from east to west. That means exotic and aesthetic shooting spots are always within reach.

Favourite spot to shoot in Singapore

The tallest HDB buildings around (public housing projects)! These developments are normally built up to 50 storeys, 150 metres in the sky. It’s always surreal and breathtaking to be watching the city’s vast expanse from above, or savour the evening sunset.

Future Plans

I’m always excited to see where my Unsplash photographs appear! It’s interesting to see them used in newspaper articles and even as advertisements by the biggest brands around, shown to myself!

Previous events hosted by Klaus

Singapore Photowalk

Connect with Klaus

Unsplash
Facebook
Instagram

Are you interested in organising an Unsplash event in your area? We’d love to hear from you! Here’s where to start.

Host Profile: Klaus Tan was originally published in Unsplash Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.