Type of site Public domain imagery Website pixabay.com | Available in Multilingual (26) Alexa rank 744 (September 2016) | |
Created by Hans Braxmeier,Simon Steinberger Launched November 24, 2010 (2010-11-24) | ||
Pixabay.com is an international website for sharing high quality public domain photos, illustrations, vector graphics, and film footage. As of September 2016, Pixabay offers over 750,000 free photos, illustrations, and vectors and 3,100 videos.
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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 (API) 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 (Thai, Vietnamese, Greek, Slovak, Bulgarian, Danish) and in 2015, Pixabay started offering film footage in addition to images - all of which released under Creative Commons license CC0.
Description
On Pixabay, users can find and contribute quality images and footage films free of copyrights. 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 under Creative Commons deed CC0, thus permitting free usage of their work. Consequently, anyone is allowed to use, modify and redistribute the images freely - even in commercial applications - without asking for permission and without accreditation.
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.
Quality standards for contributors
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 images must have at least 1920 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 (over 4,5 million downloads).
Staff
Hans Braxmeier - founder and CEO of Pixabay - has studied computer science in Ulm, Germany. During and after his studies, he launched several other web projects.
Simon Steinberger - co-founder and also CEO of Pixabay - studied chemistry in Ulm and finished his PhD in 2011. During this time, he started working in the IT sector and developed various other websites.
Achim Thiemermann is responsible for social media marketing and Olga Foma focuses on image quality control.
Popularity
Pixabay was ranked 1,409th on Alexa on January 9th, 2016 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.
Technology
Pixabay's backend is written in the Python based web framework Django, running on an Nginx server with PostgreSQL as database system. The internal search is working on a Lucene based ElasticSearch server.