Getty Images Makes 35 Million Photos Free to Use Online

Found­ed in 1997, Get­ty Images has made a busi­ness out of licens­ing stock pho­tog­ra­phy to web sites. But, in recent years, the com­pa­ny has strug­gled, fac­ing stiffer com­pe­ti­tion from oth­er com­pa­nies .… and from online pira­cy. Quot­ed in the British Jour­nal of Pho­tog­ra­phy, Craig Peters, a Senior VP at Get­ty Images, observes that Get­ty is “real­ly start­ing to see the extent of online infringe­ment. In essence, every­body today is a pub­lish­er thanks to social media and self-pub­lish­ing plat­forms. And it’s incred­i­bly easy to find con­tent online and sim­ply right-click to utilise it.” All of this becomes a prob­lem, for Get­ty, when cash-strapped “self pub­lish­ers, who typ­i­cal­ly don’t know any­thing about copy­right and licens­ing,” start right click­ing and using the com­pa­ny’s images with­out attri­bu­tion or pay­ment.

Fight­ing a los­ing bat­tle against infringers, Get­ty Images sur­prised con­sumers and com­peti­tors yes­ter­day when it announced that it would make 35 mil­lion images free for pub­lish­ers to use, with a few strings attached. Pub­lish­ers, broad­ly defined, are now allowed to add cer­tain Get­ty images to their sites, on the con­di­tion that they use embed code pro­vid­ed by the com­pa­ny.  That embed code (find instruc­tions here) will ensure that “there will be attri­bu­tion around that image,” that “images will link back to [Get­ty’s] site and direct­ly to the image’s details page,” and that Get­ty will receive infor­ma­tion on how the images are being used and viewed.

Not every Get­ty image can be embed­ded — only 35,000,000 of the 80,000,000 images in Get­ty’s archive. And, to be sure, many of those 35 mil­lion Get­ty images are stock pho­tos that will leave you unin­spired. But if you’re will­ing to sift patient­ly through the col­lec­tion, you can find some gems, like the shots fea­tured above of some great jazz leg­ends — Miles Davis, Bil­lie Hol­i­day and John Coltrane.

If you’re inter­est­ed in rum­mag­ing through free images from muse­ums and libraries, don’t miss our recent post: Where to Find Free Art Images & Books from Great Muse­ums, and Free Books from Uni­ver­si­ty Press­es.

via BJP

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

14,000 Free Images from the French Rev­o­lu­tion Now Avail­able Online

The Get­ty Puts 4600 Art Images Into the Pub­lic Domain (and There’s More to Come)

Where to Find Free Art Images & Books from Great Muse­ums, and Free Books from Uni­ver­si­ty Press­es