Add images from unsplash

What is your idea about?
it is very difficult to pick an image from unsplash and use it in eg a content element

What is the potential impact of your idea?
get easy access to images

Who can / should implement your idea?
The TYPO3 Association should look for someone

Approximate Funds needed
€5,000 - €10,000

Application by
Kurt Dirnbauer

4 Likes

This would be a great feature for beginners, though I wouldn’t limit it to Unsplash. Let’s make an easy API for hooking in image services such as this one.

I pondered a bit about this when I wrote the Google Drive FAL integration earlier this year. FAL isn’t designed for these kind of image services, so what’s needed is a search and listing interface that adds images to FAL when you select them for use.

This would also go great with the addition of a thumbnail view in the Filelist module (a suggested feature in Improve Beginner UI Sprints).

Some image banks also have great alternative text, so that should be imported together with the image and photo credits.

I had exactly the same idea and did a little research. Besides Unsplash I found Pexels and Pixabay to have an API to access free content. Reshot states that it is working on one.

Besides images Pexels and Pixabay also offer videos.

I checked a number of sites and found many without an API:

  • Burst
  • StockSnap
  • KaboomPics
  • Gratisography
  • PicJumbo
  • freeimages
  • rawpixel
  • PikWizard
  • stockvault
  • FOCA
  • picography
  • freestocks
  • foodiesfeed
  • librestock
  • Styled Stock
  • ISO republic
  • picspree
  • life of pix
  • skitterphoto

I may have not checked all of them:

All Sites have WordPress plugins:

The last one is probably the best example for an API as it can access many image services.

Drupal also has plugins:

3 Likes

This is a really nice idea and I would create and also use that extension. :slight_smile:
Maybe we can put it in one extension, not like WordPress is doing it.

1 Like

Then this is your example:

But as @mabolek suggested it probably makes sense to decouple the backend UI from the service integration. Add the UI and an API to the Core and let TER extensions integrate the services. This decouples adaptions to changes in the services API from Core releases.

Hey … i was working on unsplash integration. But currently stuck at creating the folder tree.

Yup. That’s the challenge with FAL integration for those APIs. That’s why I suggest only interacting with FAL when the image is chosen and needs to be accessible as a resource.

IMHO FAL is also for other reason not the way to go.

The image/video sites are not really built around a folder concept. They use tags, maybe categories. For the UI I envision more a filtered preview image view concept rather than a tree.

I have created a non-public extension for pexels.com in 2019 already. It connects with the pexels.com API, provides a search function in the backend and downloads the files to a given folder inside of the fileadmin. So far I did not implement a direct selection inside of the content elements wich is on my list. I also thought about multiple platforms like unsplash, picjumbo etc., but found it more practical when users can decide wich one they use. If you create an extension with multiple platform support, you will also have more codes to eventually update in the future, even if a user only uses pexels for instance. This is why I personally prefer multiple extensions for this, that can be used together. Just my 5 cent.

3 Likes

@typo3-freelancer cool, why don’t you open source it?

Honestly the reason is that I contacted pexels.com and they never really replied to my questions about cooperation. They gave me an API key but somehow it has become limited to a small number of requests/results. So I did not want to publish an extension that doesn’t work as expected.

FYI, we published this kind of extension last week


with some connectors

and
3 Likes

That’s soooo cool! :+1: :heart_eyes: