A Closer Look at Pixabay - Tips & Tricks to Improve Your Experience
When people make use of Pixabay, they often just search for an image, download it and leave. There's much more to the Pixabay website than you would expect. Artists have their own profiles and you can even make use of their API to include Pixabay results into your app or website. Special thanks to @transcript-junky for giving me the inspiration to write this article.
One of the MOST forgotten features of Pixabay, has to be the donation button that resides next to every image you'll find on Pixabay. Consider pressing it if you've used an image from Pixabay on a Steemit post that has done well.
Videos
Pixabay has a pretty extensive collection of Public Domain videos. They're easy to miss, since they're usually not featured on the front page.
The majority of videos found here are in HD quality, quite a few are even in 4K. If you're ever in need of royalty-free videos for one of your own projects, be sure to take a look here.
You can search for videos on Pixabay through https://pixabay.com/en/videos/
Advanced Image Search
Just like with Google Search, you can use certain symbols and operators in the Pixabay search field to fine-tune your search queries. Some examples below.
Combine
To combine multiple search terms, you can use the operator OR in your search. For example, if you want your results to include cars, planes and bikes, you should search with these parameters => car OR plane OR bike example
If you do not include the OR operator in your search, you will only get results which include all of those tags. example
Exclude Images
Sometimes it can be really handy to exclude certain photos from your search results. It's really easy to do, you just add a minus(-) symbol in from of the word you want to exclude from your results. For example, you want to search for pictures of the ocean, but do not want any sunset pictures included in your results, use these parameters => ocean -sunset
Fuzzy Search
You can add a tilde(~) symbol to the end of a word, to automatically check for words that have a different spelling. For example, if you search for words that are spelled differently in American and British spelling, it might be useful to add the tilde symbol => colorful~ or labour~
This is just the tip of the iceberg, you can find many more advanced search operators when you read this blog post by Pixabay.
Pixabay API
You may make use of Pixabay's API if you're looking to search and retrieve public domain images from their website, to use in your own projects.
They do ask you to include a link back to Pixabay, but other than that it's completely free. You're limited to 5000 requests per hour and permanent hotlinking is not allowed.
The Pixabay API is a RESTful interface. Check out Pixabay's API documentation here
The Pixabay Community
Pixabay isn't exactly known as a social media platform, but it does have some features that allow for interaction between artists and fans. Every artist on Pixabay has their own profile page, which you can access by clicking on the username of the artist and navigating to the 'About Me' section of their profile.
Usually they will at least have all the cameras listed that they've used and sometimes people also add a small biography. Some artists will also share their professional website, if you wish to hire them for additional services.
Pixabay Forum is a very active discussion board where you can interact with other members. If you ever have any questions regarding a photo, this is the place where you want to ask.
I hope that these type of blogs are useful and interesting for some people. Do leave a comment if you have any more suggestions or questions regarding Pixabay!
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I did not know about the fuzzy search but that is a great thing to know, I love that Steemit can show you new things daily, just like real life. lol.. Thanks for the extra info.
I don't always find what I'm looking for on Pixabay, but I can usually use something that's close enough.
Hey @daan! Great to see that you have been able to provide valuable information to people through this post. I was not aware of the Pixabay forum, which is something of interest to me...
I had no idea about that trick, I'll start using it because for my articles I always use Pixabay, I think it's a very useful page since the artists leave us their images or projects so we can use them for free.
One aspect to add is that it is convenient to register on the site. Because if you are not yet a member, you have a restriction to download images with higher quality or larger dimensions. It is a quick and easy process so it will not last more than 5 minutes.
Great post again @daan! I didn't know these search possibilities on Pixabay.. And I do usually find my pictures there when I don't have any of my own. So This is something I will definitely use next time. I've shared your post in the c2 server as you can see ;) Great post again, thank you!
Since I take my own photos I seldom, well never go to the site, but I do often get asked so its good to have some more knowledge on it so thanks for sharing this
Thanks for the tips, especially for advanced image searches! I wasn't aware they had videos as well so thank you! Will definitely keep this in mind
I might take a look at their API I will be needing something with the images soon.
Very interesting, I had no idea that all these features were available. I particularly like the donation button. I generally use Pexels but will go squizz out Pixabay again.
Thank you for this valuable info @daan, so much more to pixabay, plus I did not know about the donation button!