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If you are a blogger, you are most likely well-acquainted with Unsplash. The Unsplash website provides “beautiful, free images and photos that you can download and use for any project”. Now, there is a way to directly connect your WordPress site with Unsplash – via the newly released Unsplash plugin for WordPress.
The plugin has been co-developed with XWP, and its purpose is to connect Unsplash’s free image library with the WordPress editor. The mutual project can be described as “bringing the internet’s image library to the internet’s publishing platform“, as Unsplash co-founder Luke Chesser puts it.
Official Unsplash Plugin for WordPress Provides Seamless Integration
The new Unsplash plugin for WordPress is suitable for all types of websites – from small blogs to big businesses. However, the inspiration for developing the plugin came from large publishing organizations, leading to the creation of seamless integration for WordPress.
We’ve been working with a lot of publishers as they integrate Unsplash into their publishing flows to replace legacy solutions. With so many publishers being powered by WordPress, we saw a repeated need for a high-quality integration that could be shared by all of the publishers. In order to best serve them, we needed to offer something that we could ensure met their needs both now and in the future, Chesser explains.
It is noteworthy that Unsplash’s official plugin for the popular CMS is not the first one. Instant Image is a well-known plugin that provides one-click Unsplash uploads, and is the biggest competitor of the official plugin, having more than 50,000 active installs. Having in mind the number of apps created with Unsplash’s API, the team was hesitant whether to develop their own.
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However, by closely analyzing the way the existing plugins have been developed, and gathering feedback from various publishers, Unsplash’s team decided developing their own plugin is a great idea after all. Here are some issues that existing plugins have. First of all, most plugins reupload the image to the WordPress library treating it as a standard image. This leads to several issues, including losing image attribution to the photographer, and the longer time needed to download and upload the image.
These issues appear to have been solved in the official Unsplash plugin for WordPress, which provides a seamless and user-friendly experience. Have you tested the plugin, and if so, what is your opinion of it? Let us know in the comment section below.
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