It’s crunch time for Getty Images, and for photographers

Sometimes people use their images without paying the fee.*

How is that entrapment?

* this is separate from issue of bogus requests to people who didn't copy their images without a license.

https://towardsdatascience.com/the-most-important-supreme-co...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....

I can’t wait for a chef to throw their arms up because they get tasked to create an AI-generated non-existant food tray that performed well in Amazon Turk focus groups.

It's just that there are too many photos and photographers out there these days. All pro photographers I've met were struggling to make a living off of it.

2. Let photographers set their own prices

3. Let buyers search by budget and by license

4. Startup charges a X% platform fee

The market will take care of the rest.

You can't always accurately assess this of course, so it's mostly done by gut feel after learning a bit about the company, but it's done me well so far and I've never had a company turn down my price, nor have I ever felt like I've been taken advantage of.

It perfectly captures an advertisement aesthetic.

When I visited your link, I spent several seconds thinking the page hadn't loaded properly. I could see the caption, but not the image.

Then I realized that the image was in fact there, but my eyes were skipping over it in the exact same way I ignore banner ads.

Photographers aren't getting paid much, the current rate is about 80% to Getty and 20% to the photog. The rate used to be 40% Getty and 60% photog, some people are grandfathered but only if they've been on Getty for 20 years.

Typical working photographers on Getty probably get paid dozens of dollars a month. Typical amateurs might get a dozen dollars a year.

As consumers we get hosed, but at least they've looked out for number one, right?

Photographers use their work product as advertising, so attach their name to their work. They also often do any retouching themselves. This, along with copyright preventing modification of the images, allows those images to accurately reflect the abilities of the photographer.

It's a lot like software licensing in that way. As a company, you don't necessarily want someone tweaking your software you've sold to the and either expecting support, or even just possibly leaving a bad association with your software for the people that use it that don't realize that the reason it may be unstable is because someone has made unstable changes.

That doesn't make it good, but it does explain their thinking somewhat. Photographers are like software consultants, but because of the different time they came to prominence, they've managed to make it the norm that they retain rights to their work product. This is changing though. It's not too hard to find photographers that are willing to just dump the images to DVD pre-retouching and hand them over for you to do with as you wish. It won't be cheap, because they are losing out on being able to upsell you albums and video collages, etc, and their cost reflects not just the time they spent there, but their experience in knowing where to be and what to do to get the best pictures (in the same way that someone that pays my consulting rate is paying for my decades of experience).

That probably means the wedding photography business is not actually sustainable at $1,000 per engagement (no pun intended). They probably need to make (example) $1,500 per engagement to make it worth their time, but the industry has consolidated around a "standard" of lower foot in the door costs where they make up the additional money required on the back-end via licensing the IP.

One could create a photography business where there is a one time cost of $1,500 and the customer retains all IP rights, but customers probably just (ignorantly) view you as 50% more expensive than the "exact same service" sans IP rights.

The other thing to keep in mind, is by breaking out costs associated with IP ownership, the service isn't just hiding total up-front cost, they are also offloading some of the burden of cost from the purchasing decision maker (ie bride/groom) to the wedding guests.

I have no idea if the above is correct, but wedding photography is a commoditized service so odds are there's a reason it's standardized this way.

It's easy to get the copyright. Just say it's work done for hire, the RAWs are part of the deliverables, and they won't have to shoot anything stupid. If they balk, break it off and contact someone else.

Their job is lighting, framing, focus, capture, in that order. Postprocessing and prints are not part of the deal unless they can upsell it.

Also, if you think the cost is unreasonable, I completely disagree. Photography is a very expensive vocation, and the wedding season is very short. There is little room for error, and the photos have an enormous emotional significance. The event day (or days) is incredibly long, and cataloging and processing images can be an enormous time suck afterward. I get that some people may not be interested in wedding photos, but that doesn't mean the photographers are overpriced for the work they do.