10,000,000 Views: What Six Years of Giving Back on Unsplash Taught Me

March 15, 2026 2 mins read

10,000,000 Views: What Six Years of Giving Back on Unsplash Taught Me

📸 10,000,000 views.

About six years ago I started uploading some of my photos to Unsplash. No strategy. No big plan. Just the idea of giving something back after using so many great free photos from other creators for my own presentations, documents and talks.

Last week those images quietly crossed 10 million views in total. That felt like a nice moment to stop and reflect on what has happened since I uploaded that first photo.

Back when I got started, I wrote down my reasons and the early numbers in Hello Photography — my original announcement of joining Unsplash. Half a million views felt astonishing back then. Twenty times later, it still does.

Photos That Travel the World

The thing I still find remarkable is where these images end up. Since I published them, they have quietly traveled the world — appearing in presentations, blogs, websites and projects I will probably never even see.

One photo I’m especially proud of shows a bee resting on my wife’s hand. A reverse image search now turns up 300+ pages using it, many of them in the beekeeping community. Moments like that make you realize how far a single image can travel once you set it free.

The Top 5

For the curious, here are the five most-viewed photos that got me to 10 million:

Honey bee hovering over purple wildflowers
Wooden ema prayer plaques at a temple in Tokyo
Yellow bee resting on a hand — the one on my wife’s hand
Ornate stucco ceiling in Venice
A laughing ostrich in Mallorca

Bees, apparently, are a recurring theme. 🐝

Small Contributions, Surprising Reach

When I started contributing to Unsplash I never set publishing goals or a fixed rate. I don’t go on dedicated photography trips to produce content. Instead, I take photos during travels and weekend getaways and upload the ones I deem worth sharing. That low-effort, no-pressure approach is exactly why I’ve kept it up for six years.

And that’s the part I keep coming back to: small creative contributions can have a surprisingly large reach over time. A handful of photos, uploaded whenever I happened to have something worth sharing, added up to ten million views — without any promotion or plan.

Thanks to everyone who downloaded or used one of the images. 🙌

If you’re curious, you can browse all of them in the photography section of this site or follow me on Unsplash.

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