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This is seriously better than the old "gettyimages" watermark. And it's a very thoughtful way to get traffic back to their website. It (almost implicitly) expects people to use and share the watermarked image.

I predict a greater use of watermarked images and greater traffic back to Getty Images.

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They could've made shorter URLs if they used numbers and letters (base 36).

Not sure if there are any comparative studies about it, but aren't random numbers a lot more readable than random alphabets (with numbers)? I have read people raise this issue with IPv6. Choosing to use just numbers seems like a good idea to me.

Phone numbers in the U.S. used to have a exchange name followed by numbers (the most famous example is "Pennsylvania 6-5000"). Folks would dial "P-E" (which is why there were letters on the old dial phones) and then the digits.

I can assume that they fell out of favor because human memory favored the "3 digit-4 digit" chunking of the phone number rather than the "two letter-5 digit" chunking.

The short URL link isn't just random, it correlates to the image's "Creative Image Number".

Ah, so powerusers can just write down the number and know it's the Getty "Creative Image Number" and look it up at their liesure. Very clever.

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