Unsplash is a new large bank of CC0 stock pictures, rather more funky than the usual stock look. There’s a Pinterest-y aspect to the service, which allows members to curate folders called Collections. This is useful when your search shows no results. For instance, I searched for Business Independent and had no results, but was pointed to two somewhat useful Collections on ‘Work’ and ‘Office’. A search for Business Creative was better, though as Mac-cultist and white-walls as you might expect, but I found a few excellent pictures (see below) for illustrating creative industries production activities.

Presentation of a Collection assumes you have superfast broadband, with huge previews, which means slow browsing for the rest of us. It makes one especially reluctant to open Collections which have over about 50 pictures. There are also some curious word-wuffles: search for Animation and get Animals, for instance.

There’s no-hassle downloads though: just click “Download” and the picture downloads. Test downloads revealed 2700px+ pictures, usually at 72dpi. I think the biggest I downloaded was 40Mb. The photographer name is sensibly embedded in the file-name, should you want to credit.

Here’s my ‘creative industries’ selection, batched to 80% compression, which takes it from 360Mb to 58Mb in total without changing pixel size.

(For poets and visionaries).