Not surprised to see Unsplash develop their own ‘official’ plugin for the repo. Unfortunately I don’t see this as a good thing, but actually the opposite.

They can now force user sign ups to inflate their user base even though other plugins just serve images without any sort of authentication. What is the point in a user authenticating to only receive an API key? It’s not like you can access Likes or your collection with only the API key.

Serving images from their CDN also allows them to track image views and URLs which helps inflate the download and view counts for their contributors. These other plugins like Instant Images downloads the file to your media library which would only count as a single download.

I’m going to stick with Instant Images as I don’t feel like feeding the advertising machine.