Unsplash has never been the most monetarily rewarding for photographers. It's true that they have the highest quality mass source of royalty-free photographs on the Internet. However, it doesn't have a [donate button](https://petapixel.com/2019/10/07/i-tried-unsplash-for-two-years-heres-what-i-learned/) for the authors, and there is basically no way to reward an author except to follow an extremely small link to their Twitter or Facebook to see if they were smart enough to put a "donate to me" link somewhere.

Pixabay does have such a donate button. But then again, people earn fiat through intermediaries that will all take a cut.

![](https://i.ibb.co/vQTNQRC/Slice-11-1.jpg)

## Should We Create an Unsplash Alternative on Steem?

What sets apart Unsplash-like royalty-free sources of images on the Internet is their search functionality and the itemisation of photographs. Here on Steem, we have the [photography](https://steemit.com/trending/photography) tag, but we don't have any proper indexation for individual photographs. Even having the tags and the title, the best way to find a post is by googling it. It's ridiculously hard to find things that have been posted on the blockchain through anything other than Google.

In my opinion, the best solution to this problem, in terms of photography and many other things, is to create a database that permits us to index all the posts on the blockchain and find them with a custom-made search functionality. This already existed, but it was not profitable because the computing power required to parse the blockchain constantly is very high as well, although this computing power and the storage requirements have all decreased a lot due to updates to the blockchain.

### Requirements

To create an Unsplash alternative based on the Steem protocol, we would first have to develop

1. A parallel indexation database that allows for proper Google-like searching
2. A few search engine front-ends for the main kinds of content (text, photography, video and audio)

It would all have to run on someone's server. Due to the requirements of the project, it would probably have to be run on a Witness's setup.

### Problems

I could probably develop a working model on my own computer. I'd have to scrape someone's node for all posts. It would then get parsed and then serialised into a database. The problem would be that it's expensive to monitor the database for all changes continuously, both for the scraper and the Witness. I don't think it's too hard, though. I've been away from blockchain code for more than a year.

Does anybody who works with the blockchain know how possible this is? It looks simple enough in my mind, and it would also be simple enough to create a quality list of stock photographers who could request to be added to a curated list. Then someone looking for stock photos could just literally filter by tag, search for a keyword, toggle the "only whitelisted" option and have a big list of photographs.

Photographs would also have to be tagged with their license because public access is not the same as royalty-free. 

Anyway that's my 2 cents. If I have time and resources I'll develop this. If someone wants to develop it, just do it, and maybe hit me up and I can help if you need, but I only know Nodejs and Javascript.

And if it gets enough traction, it could even be added as a feature to the blockchain itself in the far future, or be powered by communities, all royalty free and not-so-free.