Case Study: Unsplash achieves scalable, high-performance image delivery and rapid feature development with imgix

How Unsplash uses imgix to build new features quickly and serve 350 million images per month

Crew (the marketplace now known for matching vetted creative professionals) launched Unsplash in 2013 to grow both sides of its network with virtually no marketing budget — using spare photos from a redesign to publish 10 free high‑quality images every 10 days. After moving from Tumblr/S3 to a custom web app, the team struggled with slow, brittle image processing (ImageMagick + background workers) that hurt performance on their infinite‑scroll, masonry layouts and made avatar cropping difficult as the community grew to tens of thousands of images.

They adopted imgix to handle on‑the‑fly resizing and face‑aware cropping, cutting development time, eliminating image delivery problems at scale (from 20M to 350M image views/month) and enabling circular avatars with simple parameters. The result: faster feature development, reliable image delivery, >5M site visitors, Unsplash becoming Crew’s #1 referral source, and overall company growth of about 15× with clients like IDEO and Eventbrite.

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Luke Chesser

Unsplash