Pixabay.com is an international, copyleft and free-to-use website for sharing photos, illustrations, vector graphics, film footage and music. As of November 2017, Pixabay offers over 1,188,454 free photos, illustrations, and vectors and videos. All video and image files available on the platform can be used without attribution requirement and also for commercial aim. In November 2018, Canva acquired Pixabay along with Pexels.
History
The enterprise was founded in November 2010 in Ulm, Germany by Hans Braxmeier and Simon Steinberger. In March 2012, Pixabay was redesigned, switching from a personal image collection into an interactive online community, supporting 20 languages. In May of the same year, a public Application Programming Interface was launched, allowing third party users and website developers to search Pixabay's image database. Today, the API is being used by the designer community Psykopaint, and inside Jimdo's WYSIWYG homepage editor. Along with Flickr, YouTube and Wikimedia Commons, in June 2012, Pixabay was included on Creative Commons' official CC search site. On a regular basis, Pixabay received attention in international print and online magazines. In 2014, six additional interface languages were implemented and in 2015, Pixabay started offering film footage in addition to images. On 9 January 2019, Pixabay left CC0 and changed its license to the "Pixabay License", which prohibits the sale of unaltered copies of the licensed works, or distribution as stock images or wallpapers.
Description
On Pixabay, users can find and contribute quality images and footage films. For uploading files and downloading full sized images, a free registration is required. By uploading files, the contributors waive their copyright and related image rights. Depicted content may yet be protected by trademarks, publicity or privacy rights. To ensure a high quality standard and avoid legal issues, all uploaded images are checked manually by Pixabay's staff members.
Image contributors must respect Pixabay's quality standards: The image file format must be JPEG, PNG, PSD, AI, or SVG and the file size may not be over 40 MB. Furthermore, all newly submitted images must have at least 3000 px at one side; they must show something useful and have no obvious technical flaws. Footage can be uploaded in MPEG, MOV and AVI format and file sizes may not surpass 300 MB. A minimum resolution of 1280×800 pixels is required, and clips should not exceed 60 seconds.
Photographers
In January 2016, there were about 33,200 active image authors. Hans Braxmeier himself contributed over 20,000 images, which were downloaded over two million times. The second most active contributor was geralt, who uploaded 10,000 images.
Popularity
Pixabay was ranked 501st on Alexa on September 14, 2017. Google assigned the domain a PageRank of six.
Visitors and users
About 27% of Pixabay's visitors speak English, 20% Spanish, 11% Portuguese, 7% German, and 5% speak French. Users are mainly bloggers, graphics designers, authors, journalists and advertisers.
