Web address	pixabay.com
Type of site	Public domain imagery
Available in	Multilingual (26)
Created by	Hans Braxmeier, Simon Steinberger
Launched	November 24, 2010
Alexa rank	1.156 (March 2015)[1]
Current status	Active

Pixabay.com is an international website for sharing high quality public domain photos, illustrations, vector graphics, and film footage. In June 2016, Pixabay offered about 650,000 free photos, illustrations, and vectors and almost 1,300 films.[2]

The enterprise was founded in November 2010 in Ulm, Germany by Hans Braxmeier and Simon Steinberger. In March 2012, Pixabay was redesigned, switching from a personal image collection into an interactive online community, supporting 20 languages. In May the same year, a public Application Programming Interface (API) was launched, allowing third party users and website developers to search Pixabay's image database. Today, the API is being used by the designer community Psykopaint, and inside Jimdo's WYSIWYGhomepage editor.[3] Along with Flickr, YouTube and Wikimedia Commons, in June 2012, Pixabay was included on Creative Commons' official CC search site.[4] On a regular basis, Pixabay received attention in international print and online magazines.[5][6][7][8][9][10][11] In 2014, six additional interface languages were implemented (Thai, Vietnamese, Greek, Slovak, Bulgarian, Danish) and in 2015, Pixabay started offering film footage in addition to images - all of which released under Creative Commons license CC0.

On Pixabay, users can find and contribute quality images and footage films free of copyrights. For uploading files and downloading full sized images, a free registration is required. By uploading files, the contributors waive their copyright and related image rights under Creative Commons deed CC0, thus permitting free usage of their work. Consequently, anyone is allowed to use, modify and redistribute the images freely - even in commercial applications - without asking for permission and without accreditation.

Depicted content may yet be protected by trademarks, publicity or privacy rights.[12] To ensure a high quality standard and for avoiding legal issues, all uploaded images are checked manually by Pixabay's staff members.

Image contributors must respect Pixabay's quality standards: The image file format must be JPG, PNG, PSD, AI, or SVG and the file size may not be over 40 MB. Furthermore, all images must have at least 1920 px at one side; they must show something useful and have no obvious technical flaws.[13]

Footage can be uploaded in MPEG, MOV and AVI format and file sizes may not surpass 300 MB. A minimum resolution of 1280×800 pixels is required, and clips should not exceed 60 seconds.[14]

In January 2016, there were about 33,200 active image authors. Hans Braxmeier himself contributed over 20,000 images, which were downloaded over two million times. The second most active contributor was geralt, who uploaded 10,000 images (over 4,5 million downloads).[15]