Getty Images makes its images free to use

Less sexy, more accurate title: "Getty to allow free embedding of low-res versions for some of its images. Embeds will contain advertising and other monetization options soon."

Not to rain on anybody's parade - but how usable will this really be? First, they're doing iframe embeds which rules out background-image and related uses. Although not part of initial roll out, they may at some point embed advertisements in the iframe and start collecting data. Finally, there's no commercial use. While this is interesting - I see a lot of restrictions hindering a wide adoption.

Here&#x27;s the relevant section from Getty Images&#x27; Terms of Use:<p><pre><code> Embedded Viewer Where enabled, you may embed Getty Images Content on a website, blog or social media platform using the embedded viewer (the “Embedded Viewer”). Not all Getty Images Content will be available for embedded use, and availability may change without notice. Getty Images reserves the right in its sole discretion to remove Getty Images Content from the Embedded Viewer. Upon request, you agree to take prompt action to stop using the Embedded Viewer and&#x2F;or Getty Images Content. You may only use embedded Getty Images Content for editorial purposes (meaning relating to events that are newsworthy or of public interest). Embedded Getty Images Content may not be used: (a) for any commercial purpose (for example, in advertising, promotions or merchandising) or to suggest endorsement or sponsorship; (b) in violation of any stated restriction; (c) in a defamatory, pornographic or otherwise unlawful manner; or (d) outside of the context of the Embedded Viewer. Getty Images (or third parties acting on its behalf) may collect data related to use of the Embedded Viewer and embedded Getty Images Content, and reserves the right to place advertisements in the Embedded Viewer or otherwise monetize its use without any compensation to you. </code></pre> Full terms here: <a href="http://www.gettyimages.com/Corporate/Terms.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gettyimages.com&#x2F;Corporate&#x2F;Terms.aspx</a><p>So, if you don&#x27;t want your images to possibly disappear at some point in the future or be replaced by ads, you might just pay or find a free alternative. But this move seems like a pretty fair way to let bloggers&#x2F;tumblrs use the images with attribution.

<p><pre><code> &quot;Look, if you want to get a Getty image today, you can find it without a watermark very simply,&quot; he says. &quot;The way you do that is you go to one of our customer sites and you right-click. Or you go to Google Image search or Bing Image Search and you get it there. And that&#x27;s what&#x27;s happening… Our content was everywhere already.&quot; </code></pre> When Getty Images gets in the news in Holland it is usually for sending angry letters, demanding up to a 20.000Euro fine for using an image no greater than 150px by 150px on a non-commercial site, no notice. [1].<p>&quot;And that&#x27;s what&#x27;s happening&quot;. Yes, and what happens next is that Getty Images places the misleading &quot;royalty free&quot; on their sites and that using an image found on Google Images on a personal blog gets you a letter from one of their lawyer companies. First few years those letters were sent, not over snail mail, not in the Dutch language, but addressed to postmaster@example.com with references to Irish laws that don&#x27;t apply here, yet with a deadline to pay up.<p>With claims of on average a few hundred Euro&#x27;s vs damages of max. 20-30 Euros, many suspected that Getty profited heavily from having their pictures &quot;everywhere already&quot;, preferably not with the original license intact, adding to the profitable confusion.<p>&quot;Free to use&quot; I don&#x27;t believe in with this company. It wouldn&#x27;t surprise me if heavy use of non-watermarked image embedding will lead to more spurious copyright infringement claims [2].<p>Disclaimer: I received such a letter a few years back when a client provided a thumbnailed image of a pizza they had right-click-saved somewhere. The letter claimed damages for using a full-resolution image with all the publishing rights totaling 750Euro.<p>[1] English source: <a href="http://excesscopyright.blogspot.com/2008/05/watching-getty-images-watching.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;excesscopyright.blogspot.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;05&#x2F;watching-getty-i...</a><p>[2] About Pic-Scout, their image crawler, not respecting robots.txt and being very difficult to block, search &quot;picscout robots.txt&quot;

We have been doing embeds for about a year now, having Getty come in does excite us. Innovation in this space is definitely necessary - <a href="http://imgembed.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgembed.com&#x2F;</a><p>Most importantly we use flattened jpgs to facilitate responsive designs and current CMS auto-generated thumbnails while Getty uses iFrames.<p>We aim to be a fair marketplace, so our ethos might differ slightly from corporate Getty. Photographers strictly retain their rights and we only act as a facilitator.<p>Free use is limited to 10,000 impressions but is allowable for commercial use. Our belief is that beyond 10k impressions, you are probably making enough that the photographer should be fairly compensated. While we might suggest image pricing, that is fully up to the image rights owners, giving them full control.

Note: Embedded images may not be used for commercial purposes.

Just a heads-up that I tried this on Tumblr, which has a native embed, and … the implementation is partly broken. Basically, if they were doing this right, the embeds would show up inside the dashboard. They don&#x27;t—they just show up in a black box. Which is hugely disappointing as it takes away much of its viral-ness on that platform.<p>Getty is big enough that they should be able to get Karp on the horn and do this properly.

just a reminder that they still control the license and can do anything with it whenever they want. if you can find something that&#x27;s &quot;free&quot; under creative commons, I would still do that instead.<p><a href="http://search.creativecommons.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;search.creativecommons.org&#x2F;</a>

The images being embedded are of particularly low resolution - maximum size seems to be about 0.2 megapixels - so this free offer shouldn&#x27;t be encroaching onto their paying markets in any significant manner. Seems like a wise move.

The embed codes seem to be broken. They are like this:<p><pre><code> &lt;iframe src=&quot;&#x2F;&#x2F;embed.gettyimages.com&#x2F;embed&#x2F;141707234?et=bk1OGlvTI0avNVbOUXa3ZA&amp;sig=M0SraL8CHtualNed00tTEEcWOi7KfHFE17a3zoUlQBc=&quot; width=&quot;508&quot; height=&quot;407&quot; frameborder=&quot;0&quot; scrolling=&quot;no&quot;&gt;&lt;&#x2F;iframe&gt; </code></pre> with no protocol on the source attribute. Maybe this works in some browsers but it failed in Chrome. Adding the missing &quot;http:&quot; fixes it.<p>EDIT: please ignore this dumb comment but, if you are really interested, read the replies below.

This is Adware for licensed material, like a Spotify for photos. It&#x27;s not new, newspapers and magazines support their photo budget with advertisements.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adware" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Adware</a>

What bothers me at the moment is that photographers can&#x27;t opt-out. Since a lot of them are paid on a royalty basis, it appears they will be the ones really giving away their content.<p>I am often asked by photographers if we offer their photos for free at CrowdMedia (<a href="http://crowdmedia.co" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;crowdmedia.co</a>), and the only valid answer for them is NO. Whatever people do, if they do it well and it is useful to others, eventually they should get rewarded for it.<p>I like Getty&#x27;s initiative for small non-commercial blogs, but I don&#x27;t think photographers should be the ones paying for it.

Wow, old media company finally gets it. I&#x27;m guessing they are going to benefit in the following ways:<p>1. Collect and sell analytics from embedded usage.<p>2. Up-sell and cross-sell to embedees.<p>3. Use this to promote their images to potential licensees.<p>4. Destroy the remaining smaller competitive commercial stock photo sites.

I worked for a smaller stock media company, one of many, that was swallowed up by getty. If they can now use their capital and stature to run this type of business model then good for them...but it&#x27;s just an experiment in the long run. Who is their competitor? Shutterstock? I guess they couldn&#x27;t buy them.

Given that this has been available for years on Flickr (and others), Getty really doesn&#x27;t have a choice if they want to stay the market leader.<p>Getty&#x27;s competition is Facebook and Google. How many pictures does Instagram have these days?

Sounds to me like they just hired an extremely convincing SEO Link Builder

interesting development. getty is one of the photo agencies known for being pretty controlling in their licensing. At least from the photography side - the few folks that I know working as photographers all have reservations about signing contracts with them, in that they typically keep a lot more control over your work than their competitors. (I believe &quot;soul-stealing&quot; was an adjective used by a couple of folks...)

Anyone else thought about the whole backlink scenario? I hate to bring up RapGenius again, but this seems to violate Google&#x27;s webmaster guidelines as well.

This is freaking awesome, I hope it works out for them.

is this the work of a SEO link building genius?