Pexels is a free stock photography site with a curated library of over two million high-quality photos and videos. Since launching in 2014 they have always focused on diversity in their content across all cultures, ethnicities and genders. These previous efforts include a partnership with Nappy (high-res stock photos of black and brown people) to bring more representation for people of colour in their content.

A lot of these efforts ultimately go unnoticed, which is the point. But stock photography is a competitive space and Pexels wanted to start to let their existing users and target audience know that they are a stock photo site that values inclusivity at its core.

More and more cities around the world are organizing and embracing the LGBTQ+ community through pride events, with all the rainbow flags and glitter. These celebrations are fun and they do help move the needle for acceptance, but they don't make the other 364 days of the year much easier. Over two thirds of LGBTQ+ people avoid holding hands in public, abandoning a simple expression of love and belonging just to prevent any hassle and dodge potential confrontation. While there have been huge strides for gender representation in political arena, often times it's the little things and small steps that make people feel truly accepted.

While Pexels has always focused on diversity in their content, we noticed a big oversight, not only on Pexels, on all stock photo sites. They don’t return LGBTQ+ images in search results like ‘couple’, ‘love’, ‘family’, and the list goes on. So to change this, we fully updated their algorithm to give more presence to the LGBTQ+ community across all relationship-based keywords.

Pexels has thousands of photos reflecting all types of relationships and genders, but they don’t show up in common search results. This means that at the point of searching, people have to make a conscious decision whether they want a photo of a heterosexual couple or a same-sex couple, and that doesn’t seem right.

Based on user data and search analytics, we compiled a list of every search term that could potentially be an overlooked opportunity to deliver more diverse search results. And one by one we taught Pexels' algorithm to deliver more inclusive photo results across the board.

Any algorithm that learns from the actions of people, will eventually reflect and condense the biases those people have. And Pexels’ algorithm isn’t any different. So we used a series of validation techniques to essentially boost their existing LGBTQ+ images to have much more prominence. After weeks of adjustments and improvements we were able to teach the algorithm to be more inclusive across all relationship-based keywords. During pride month we updated the homepage to feature LGBTQ+ images and explain the update.

The update was a success, making headlines and receiving an estimated 7.5M earned media impressions across 17+ news networks and major publications in Canada and the US including Forbes, Entrepreneur and Vogue Business. As a result of the algorithm update, Pexels saw a 35% increase in LGBTQ+ photo views. And as more images were seen organically, they received over 3.5M additional LGBTQ+ photo downloads. With Pexels’ core userbase being creators, this increase in downloads will have a huge ripple effect and start showing through in journalism and marketing work.