We have a new example in our repository: examples/network/random_image_from_unsplash. This shows using our TCastleDownload to access Unsplash API and ask for a random image matching a given search term (like a “cute fox”).

The main part of the example is the unit gameunsplash.pas with a reusable class to download images from Unsplash.

There are 2 ways how this can be useful:

1. You can learn how to use TCastleDownload with some REST API, to access the resources in an asynchronous manner (with blocking your application).

2. And/or you can just use gameunsplash.pas unit in your own applications (feel free to just copy it, it’s on permissive BSD license) to get images from Unsplash.

   For example, you can use the images as randomized pretty background, or an image for a puzzle (to arrange puzzle pieces etc.)

   The images are generally free to use (see Unsplash license) for various, though not all, purposes. And there’s a ton of high-quality images.

To use this example, you need an API key (“access key”) from Unsplash. Don’t worry, it’s rather trivial (and free) to obtain it 🙂 Please follow the instructions in the README for details.

This is based on an actual fun application I (Michalis) did this week for our family! We have a monitor playing a role of a “wall clock” powered by the Raspberry Pi, showing clock with a nice background using TablissNG extension (a fork of it, that refreshes image from custom URL every 15 mins). I wrote a simple Pascal application to randomize the image, choosing randomly from a collection of our private photos and pretty images from Unsplash matching terms like “cute fox”. My daughter loves this 🙂 Note that Pascal application just exposes the image on local server, I deliberately made the separation between “display of image” (using TablissNG) and “choosing the image” (using my small Pascal program) to enable more future experiments with various fun ways to use these images.

I hope you enjoy it 🙂 And if you do, we appreciate your support on Patreon!