Of course, Unsplash is not a social network in that sense. That the operators have no intention of the platform being used as such was made clear at the latest when the display of how many likes a photo has was hidden – a long, long time before Instagram decided to take this step.
Nevertheless, it is not only convenient to be able to contact the photographer, for example, to tell him where his work was used or just to say thank you. After all, the simplified possibility of expressing one’s thanks in money was introduced only recently.
The messaging button opens a contact form, but the recipient receives the message exclusively via e-mail – a chat system is therefore not implemented in Unsplash at all. The form is only a way to contact the uploader via email, but without publishing the address for privacy reasons.
More than once now, it has happened to me that a message from a person who used my photo just got completely lost in my inbox. Even that sometimes mails containing Unsplash messages are marked as spam is a well-known phenomenon. So, since I seem to spend more time on Unsplash than I do in my mails, I really, really wish that a simple messaging system would be integrated on the site.
Recently, an opportunity arose in the Unsplash Slack server to address this issue – but the response was more than disillusioning. Community Support Nik answered that for the time being everything will remain as it is.
At the moment, we’re keeping things as they are, sadly, as I know how frustrating that messaging service is
always keep an eye on your spam
