Case Study: Unsplash achieves 5M+ monthly searches and improved image discovery with Imagga's Auto-Tagging API

Unsplash - Customer Case Study

Unsplash, the open-source stock photography community, faced rapid exponential growth and needed a way to improve search and classification as photos scaled from a small side project into a site with millions of downloads and views. To solve the challenge of tagging and categorizing incoming images so users could do precise keyword and category-based searches, Unsplash adopted Imagga’s Auto-Tagging API.

Imagga’s Auto-Tagging API was integrated into Unsplash’s upload pipeline to automatically suggest keywords and assign category metadata for every submitted photo, powering the site’s search and preselection workflow. The integration helped Unsplash deliver stronger search results and engagement—Imagga powered over 1 million searches in the first month and now supports 5M+ searches per month—while Unsplash grew to millions of downloads and hundreds of millions of photo views; Unsplash developers praised Imagga’s simple, reliable RESTful API.

Unsplash

Luke Chesser

Co-founder