Secrets of Pixabay

As most readers might know, pixabay.com, pexels.com, unsplash.com etc are websites where photographers share their work. This work is available for free commercial reuse without attribution. 

I am a regular contributor to pixabay.com. While all my images are selected for publication, I was rather sad to note that they had 0 views and 0 downloads. I put that down to the poor quality of my photography. 

2 weeks ago, I was looking for a free image of mehndi or henna. There was NOTHING available on all 3 free websites. So, had to use a Wikimedia image. 

However, last night, on a lark, i decided to search for all images related to a label that is not very frequent and applies to a few of my submitted images. Then, scrolled to the end, and realised, much to my surprise, that though my images were tagged with those keywords, they did not come up in the search results for those keywords, even till the end. 

This means that Pixabay keeps some published images away from users even if they are approved and published. 

Pixabay calls this the differentiation between featured (in search results) and just published. There is no count of the number of images that are published but not featured, but as a user, it appears strange that a published image should not be searchable. What's the point, then? 

How does one deal with this? 

I found that if you follow an individual contributor, that might help. Look for images and when you see an interesting one, follow that contributor. That way, you can see their images in your network.