In reply to Melissa.

The other plugins are violating the Unsplash API terms of service. Signing up for an account is very simple and can be done in the authentication flow with your name and email, or even a couple social OAuth providers like Facebook.

In a discussion about licensing I would think this point is extremely important. You cannot use the API the way those plugins currently are. However, Unsplash has not taken any action against those plugins to my knowledge. There is a lot of goodwill on their part to let the community make their own choice to do it the right and legal way.

As for the CDN, it tracks views so the really lovely people who upload their images, that you get to download for free, can know how popular those images are. I think that's fair. As well, the images are all downloaded to the media library and the CDN is actually filtering the local URL to render the assets from a free service that would normally cost you money. You are getting a free global CDN with edge caching. That's pretty nice of them, all they ask in return is to know how many times it's been downloaded and viewed while also being fully GDPR compliant.