{"id":9141,"date":"2014-03-06T09:31:59","date_gmt":"2014-03-06T14:31:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/?p=9141"},"modified":"2014-03-06T10:11:43","modified_gmt":"2014-03-06T15:11:43","slug":"great-new-for-bloggers-millions-of-photos-on-getty-images-are-now-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/2014\/03\/06\/great-new-for-bloggers-millions-of-photos-on-getty-images-are-now-free\/","title":{"rendered":"Great new for bloggers: Millions of photos on Getty Images are now free"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"drop_cap\">W<\/span>ow. I did not see this one coming.<\/p>\n<p>Getty Images announced last night that it is making approximately 40 million images &#8211; including <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gettyimages.ca\/Search\/Search.aspx?query=z.i.H4sIAAAAAAAEAOy9B2AcSZYlJi9tynt_SvVK1-B0oQiAYBMk2JBAEOzBiM3mkuwdaUcjKasqgcplVmVdZhZAzO2dvPfee--999577733ujudTif33_8_XGZkAWz2zkrayZ4hgKrIHz9-fB8_In7dfLn91etf49f4NX6PX_dskV3kvyb9mtD_f41f8_-m59e4-fk1zc-krqr2ZVZni8Z89mvh_7s7vxH9-PXevb5uTt-ZN35N729umZ1bgPo7Xv61s_Op7cD_49fGBzsMf9G6Nxftr6u__xa_Bndtf91zv95zv953v-7zr78O9VFaePYvdPfr0h_1wmIT_vnr46Nd_PXr8ecTC6PzN792HkKxfzKUHQvlvAPF_c2v1ea1zp8MZc9CqTtQ3N9E0Nxigj9-bf2DqbuL335D0_Y3xj-gN9EkX5lPf83gr187nzT2G_MHz1HucPB-_7Vy19z7_dduViv7Of4wOP5W9sXLqXvxcmrQ_i3x9479bd_-xkP5dara4z_7F381yf2vzF94fu3Z1dL8_muaP34d_L9Ze6MN_vq188zh5_9Bv6_8L-wfv24TQAv__LXfPXvupon-sF9ktYcb_WFa_S70_19_Vi1nec1QfqNmWq3yJ-vlrPRIHnxqXv1xwH2wcx-__zrEcWvbPPjr15nX8odQzPyF59d7kV_lTfv_BAAA__8xfBj6WQQAAA..#1\">600+ <\/a>from me &#8211;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.gettyimages.co.uk\/Creative\/Frontdoor\/embed\"> free for use on social media<\/a>. If you are a blogger, this is great news for you. If you are a photographer who sells imagery through Getty, maybe not so much.  <\/p>\n<p>How does it work? Visit <a href=\"http:\/\/gettyimages.com\">GettyImages.com <\/a>and find an image you like. Click on the box that looks like this < \/> and copy the embed code. Paste into your blog and voila &#8211; free stock photos.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/embed.gettyimages.com\/embed\/159132024?et=ci8VOFOOYk-yuz3rC9UBlA&#038;sig=OQRnqrpHoNGHNribHnwEUnPNFV96AGS92gf2rGneQro=\" width=\"509\" height=\"406\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Getty&#8217;s stated goal is to combat stolen imagery with a sort of &#8220;if you can&#8217;t beat &#8217;em, join &#8217;em&#8221; mentality. If people are going to use the images on social media anyway, and clearly they are, might as well offer them for free with proper attribution and links back to the source. Over the longer term, they&#8217;re hoping to add some sort of advertising element similar to what you see on YouTube, so the photographers may eventually get a (miniscule) percentage of the ad revenue as well. And there&#8217;s the ludicruosly optimistic idea that people will see an image, love it, click through and pay for it. And there&#8217;s massive good will and advertising to be earned by Getty. No more infamous Getty takedown notices, but instead lots of free images for everyone, carefully framed in Getty&#8217;s embedded ad.<\/p>\n<p>I do admit that it&#8217;s clever how Getty has taken control of how the image is used via the embed code. If the image is simply copied illegally and then uploaded somewhere on the web, Getty loses control of the image, and has to pursue illegal use through takedown notices and legal action. If they make the embed code easy to use, they retain control of the imagery from the back end &#8211; they can see how and where the image is used but the image is ultimately hosted by Getty so if the image is pulled from the catalogue Getty can simply pull it from the frame if they need to &#8211; or if they want to. <\/p>\n<p>Blogger beware, if you use the embed code you are ceding control of the images in your post to the whims and pecadilloes of Getty. Don&#8217;t be surprised to see those &#8220;free&#8221; images are later overlaid with ads you can&#8217;t control. If I were a blogger, this alone may scare me out of using these so-called free images &#8211; I can&#8217;t bring myself to sign on for any network ad affiliate program where I can&#8217;t control the exact content of the ads I am displaying, and this is exactly what would happen (potentially, at least) here. Also, there may be SEO implications with the links back to the Getty site, and some feed readers don&#8217;t perceive the embedded frame as an image if you push content to an aggregator, so you lose your thumbnail photo if you are only using Getty&#8217;s framed images.<\/p>\n<p>There is some debate about which sites can and cannot use the free embed tools. Getty says the images are for &#8220;non-commercial, digital use only.&#8221; To me, this means any site earning any income (blog ads, sponsored posts, etc) would be excluded, but it seems Getty&#8217;s definition is considerably more forgiving. How they will define let alone police commercial versus non-commercial sites remains to be seen, I suppose.<\/p>\n<p>On a personal level, I fear this will devalue any image up for grabs via the embed code &#8211; why would anyone choose to pay license fees for an image that is available for free all over the web? Would you pay for an image to use in your product, book or ad campaign if you knew it was already in use on every social media platform, blog and website? On the other hand, the sheer scope of the number of photos available may in fact mitigate this dilution of value. If they&#8217;re all free, maybe it won&#8217;t devalue individual images? I keep seeing references to the music industry, from Napster to Spotify. *shrug* I suppose it remains to be seen, and there&#8217;s not much I can do except suck it up and watch it unfold or yank all my photos from Getty entirely. <\/p>\n<p>I think my biggest peeve in this whole development is that the photos are free of watermarks. I don&#8217;t post images on my OWN blog without watermarks, so having offering them up for ALL THE BLOGGERS free of charge and watermarks is somewhere between discouraging and exasperating. . It is, on the other hand, a brilliant business move by Getty and a bonanza for bloggers and other social media content creators.<\/p>\n<p>What do you think? Brilliant business move on Getty&#8217;s part or a shiv in the back to the contributors who supply the images? Or both? Will you use the images on your site and are you at all worried about embedding a frame that Getty controls and may later pepper with ads? Anybody more familiar with SEO able to offer insight about the implications from that perspective? How should &#8220;commercial&#8221; sites be defined?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wow. I did not see this one coming. Getty Images announced last night that it is making approximately 40 million images &#8211; including 600+ from me &#8211; free for use on social media. If you are a blogger, this is great news for you. If you are a photographer who sells imagery through Getty, maybe &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/2014\/03\/06\/great-new-for-bloggers-millions-of-photos-on-getty-images-are-now-free\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Great new for bloggers: Millions of photos on Getty Images are now free&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9141"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9147,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9141\/revisions\/9147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}