Image by Craig Whitehead on Unsplash

While in conversation last week at the EDEN annual conference in Bruges, my good friend Marci Powell told me about a brilliant resource called Unsplash. It’s a website that hosts a huge, and ever growing repository of superb images, shared freely by talented photographers.

The search algorithms on Unsplash are quite sophisticated. Let’s say you want to find a picture of colourful, neon lights, reflected off a wet street. Now that’s quite specific, but if you insert the search string ‘neon lights wet road’, you are immediately presented with dozens of quality images, each of which fits the criterion.

The image on this page was found using that search phrase. It’s by Craig Whitehead and is free to download and use, just like all of the other images on the site. You can choose to acknowledge the creator of the image or not, but either way, the images are all free to use.

As with any other social media platform, there are useful devices such as trending search notifications, API/developer sections and licensing advice, and there are special zones where you can find wallpaper or slide background images. You can also search for specific photographers on the landing page, and see their entire uploaded collections instantly.

For educators, this is a particularly useful resource, which I for one, will return to time and time again. I hope you will find it as useful as I have. Thank you Marci for this great tip!

Making a splash! by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.