 | |
| Type of business | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
| Available in | 28 languages |
| Founded | 2014 |
| Headquarters | Germany |
| Area served | worldwide |
| Owner | Canva |
| Founder(s) | Bruno Joseph, Ingo Joseph |
| CEO | Clifford Obrecht, Bruno Joseph |
| Industry | Stock photography, Stock footage |
| Employees | 40 |
| URL | www.pexels.com |
Pexels is a provider of stock photography and stock footage. It was founded in Germany in 2014 and maintains a library with over 3.2 million free stock photos and videos.
Pexels was founded by twin brothers Ingo and Bruno Joseph in Fuldabrück, Hesse. [1] The brothers started the platform in 2014 with around 800 photos. [1] Daniel Frese joined the team in 2015. [1] [2] The graphic design platform Canva acquired Pexels in 2018 for an undisclosed amount. [3] [4]
Pexels provides media for online download, maintaining a library that contains over 3.2 million photos and videos, growing each month by roughly 200,000 files. [1] The content is uploaded by the users and reviewed manually. Using and downloading the media is free, the website generates income through advertisements for paid content databases. There is also a donation option for users, and while attribution of the content creator is not required, it is appreciated. [1] Through the merger with Canva, Pexels' database is available in the Canva application. [5]
Pexels is committed to providing a diverse database, for example by including LGBTQ+ stock content, and through a partnership with Nappy, a platform that focuses on POC content. [6]
Pexels originally offered photos under the CC0 Creative Commons license. [7] [8] [9] Instead, it has their own set of rules for the use of their photos and footage. [10] Besides, their license does not permit the user to sell unaltered copies of a photo or video or to resell the content on other stock platforms. It is not allowed to suggest that the people or brands in the images or footage endorse a product or a brand. The photos or videos downloaded from Pexels cannot be used in trademarks, business names, or service marks. Identifiable people from the photos or videos cannot be shown in a negative or offensive way. [11]
The Pexels staff consists of the three founders, who live in Berlin, Germany, and a team of 40 who are based in Germany, other parts of Europe, and North and South America. The company does not have headquarters; all staff work from their respective homes. Bruno and Ingo Joseph were CEOs until November 2018, when Clifford Obrecht, founder of Canva, became CEO of the company. [1] [12] Bruno Joseph was reinstated as CEO in July 2020. [13]
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.
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Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was previously a common way for amateur and professional photographers to host high-resolution photos. It has changed ownership several times and has been owned by SmugMug since April 20, 2018.
iStock is an online royalty free, international micro stock photography provider based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Shutterstock, Inc. is an American provider of stock photography, stock footage, stock music, and editing tools; it is headquartered in New York. Founded in 2003 by programmer and photographer Jon Oringer, Shutterstock maintains a library of around 200 million royalty-free stock photos, vector graphics, and illustrations, with around 10 million video clips and music tracks available for licensing. Originally a subscription site only, Shutterstock expanded beyond subscriptions into a la carte pricing in 2008. It has been publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange since 2012.
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Creative Commons is maintaining a content directory wiki of organizations and projects using Creative Commons licenses. On its website CC also provides case studies of projects using CC licenses across the world. CC licensed content can also be accessed through a number of content directories and search engines.
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Pixabay.com is a free stock photography and royalty-free stock media website. It is used for sharing photos, illustrations, vector graphics, film footage, stock music and sound effects, exclusively under the custom Pixabay Content License, which generally allows the free use of the material with some restrictions. The site's images are allowed to be used for free without attribution, and allowed to be modified and adapted into new works. Pixabay does not allow users to sell or distribute the content as is, use it commercially if it contains recognizable trademarks, or use photos in immoral, illegal, misleading, or deceptive ways.
Spinlet is a digital media company, focusing on Afro-Centric content. Spinlet’s primary service is music streaming and downloads available globally via web browsers, and the Spinlet app on iOS and Android. The Spinlet platform provides the largest music catalog of licensed African and International content from content licensers such as Content Connect Africa, Africori, Symphonic Distribution, TuneCore, La Cupla Music, Deliver My Tune, and many other indies. It allows the users to purchase, listen, share and discover music while offering integration and storage of the user's music library on their mobile device. In October 2015, the Spinlet app had been downloaded nearly 2 million times.
Unsplash is a website dedicated to proprietary stock photography. Since 2021, it has been owned by Getty Images. The website claims over 330,000 contributing photographers and generates more than 13 billion photo impressions per month on their growing library of over 5 million photos. Unsplash has been cited as one of the world's leading photography websites by Forbes, Design Hub, CNET, Medium and The Next Web.
123RF, a branch of Inmagine Group, is a stock photos provider founded in 2005 which sells royalty-free images and stock photography. The company also has an expansive collection of vector graphics, icons, fonts, videos, and audio files.
Lightricks, founded in January 2013, is a company that develops video and image editing mobile apps and software, known particularly for its selfie-editing app, Facetune. Headquartered in Jerusalem, the firm has approximately 600 employees. As of 2023, its apps have been downloaded over 730 million times. In 2024, Lightricks introduced LTX Studio, a platform for creating and editing videos using AI.
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