What Is the Unsplash Featured Image Suggestion?
During onboarding, VeloCMS picks a royalty-free Unsplash featured image for your first post by site type. Keep or remove it; the editor has no picker.
The Unsplash featured image suggestion is part of the onboarding wizard. When you create your first post during setup, VeloCMS fetches a royalty-free photo from Unsplash that matches the type of site you said you're building, and shows it as a featured-image preview with a simple keep-or-remove choice. Once you're past onboarding there is no Unsplash picker in the post editor — featured images come from your own uploads or your media library.
How does the image search actually decide what to suggest?
The suggestion isn't driven by your post's text at all — it's driven by the site intent you picked earlier in onboarding. Each intent (newsletter, personal blog, photography, portfolio, business, podcast, restaurant, online shop, and so on) maps to a small set of hand-picked, deliberately un-cliché search queries, and VeloCMS queries Unsplash with one of them while the wizard prepares your first-post draft. You get a single suggestion: keep it and it's attached to the post as the featured image, or remove it and publish with no image. If the fetch fails for any reason (rate limit, network), onboarding simply continues without an image instead of blocking you.
Do I need to credit the photographer?
Unsplash photos are free to use under the Unsplash License, which doesn't require attribution — but it's good practice and the photographers appreciate it. When VeloCMS attaches a suggested image it records the photographer's name and a link to their Unsplash profile alongside the post. That credit isn't printed as a caption on your site today, so if you'd like to show it (we'd encourage it), add a small caption line to the post yourself. It's a small gesture that keeps the ecosystem healthy.
The Unsplash License covers editorial and commercial use but prohibits selling the photos themselves or using them in competing stock photo services. For a blog post or landing page you're completely fine.
How do I use my own image instead?
In the post editor, open the post settings and use the featured image field: it opens your media library, where you can pick an image you've already uploaded or upload a new one from your computer. Your uploaded image is stored in your site's media storage and becomes the featured image immediately. If an Unsplash suggestion from onboarding is still attached to the post, setting your own image replaces it — it won't override your choice on subsequent saves.