Pixabay.com is a free

stock photography Stock photography is the supply of photographs that are often licensed for specific uses. The stock photo industry, which began to gain hold in the 1920s, has established models including traditional macrostock photography, midstock photography, ...

and royalty-free stock media website. It is used for sharing photos, illustrations,

vector graphic Vector graphics are a form of computer graphics in which visual images are created directly from geometric shapes defined on a Cartesian plane, such as points, lines, curves and polygons. The associated mechanisms may include vector display ...

s, film footage,

stock music Production music (also known as stock music or library music) is recorded music that can be licensed to customers for use in film, television, radio and other media. Often, the music is produced and owned by production music libraries. Backgrou ...

and

sound effects A sound effect (or audio effect) is an artificially created or enhanced sound, or sound process used to emphasize artistic or other content of films, television shows, live performance, animation, video games, music, or other media. In m ...

, 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. The overall quality of the photos on the service has been described as "mediocre for the most part" and "variable", but covering a "wide range of subjects." The total number of assets is over 5.2 million as of December, 2024, with a total download tally of over 6 billion and over 400 thousand creators.

History

The site was founded in November 2010 in

Ulm Ulm () is the sixth-largest city of the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg, and with around 129,000 inhabitants, it is Germany's 60th-largest city. Ulm is located on the eastern edges of the Swabian Jura mountain range, on the up ...

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

, by Hans Braxmeier and Simon Steinberger. Prior to 9th January 2019, Pixabay images were released under the

CC0 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 bui ...

declaration, which deeds content into the

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...

. On that day, it imposed a custom, more restrictive license on all of its content, and changed its license to the "Pixabay License", which prohibits the sale of unaltered copies of the licensed works, or distribution as stock images or wallpapers. As the terms of CC0 explicitly indicate that the surrender into the public domain is "irrevocable" once completed, images that had already been released under CC0 prior to the change in license remain available through various

mirrors A mirror, also known as a looking glass, is an object that reflects an image. Light that bounces off a mirror forms an image of whatever is in front of it, which is then focused through the lens of the eye or a camera. Mirrors reverse the ...

distributing under the original CC0 declaration. In November 2018, Pixabay was acquired by the Australian design and publishing platform

Canva Canva is an Australian multinational proprietary software company that provides a graphic design platform that provides tools for creating social media graphics, presentations, postcards, promotional merchandise and websites. Launched in Austr ...

. On April 17th, 2023, significant changes to Pixabay’s terms of service came into effect. This included the modification of the “Pixabay License” to the “Content License”, as well as the reinstatement of the CC0 license, for content uploaded to Pixabay prior to January 9th, 2019.

References

External links

* {{Photo-stub Internet properties established in 2010 Multilingual websites Image-sharing websites Photography websites Stock photography Public domain databases