Getty Images makes its images free to use | Hacker News Reader

Getty Images makes its images free to use

vrge.co

220 pointsheidijavi43 comments

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."

No, that's not more accurate - it just reflects your personal assumptions. There is nothing in the article to suggest advertising. Rather, it says users drop in any image they want, as long as the service gets to append a footer at the bottom of the picture with a credit and link to the licensing page. Attribution is not the same thing as advertising.

Here's a Getty Images executive expressing what you feel was my "personal assumption"

> The new embeds are built on the same iframe code that lets you embed a tweet or a YouTube video, which means the company can use embeds to plant ads or collect user information. "We've certainly thought about it, whether it's data or it's advertising," Peters says, even if those features aren’t part of the initial rollout.

Still believe "there is nothing in the article to suggest advertising"?

My bad, I missed that paragraph. However, I still question your assumption that it will inevitably occur.

This is clearly a trojan horse strategy. They are reserving the rights to use these assets offensively in the future. It seems better to be aware of this than not. Getty is offering "conetent" for pixel "real estate" and distribution. This is quite a huge shift from "pay and forget" relationship with image files.

These things are basically sleeper cells.

While this is technically possible, it's much more likely they intend to use the credit line as lead generation for license sales on stock photography. If I sold stock, I would prefer that to the current situation of rampant unlicensed use.

I a agree the title is very misleading.

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.

It's not just background images that are ruled out. It's everything that isn't editorial / news related coverage:

> You may only use embedded Getty Images Content for editorial purposes (meaning relating to events that are newsworthy or of public interest).

So you can use a picture of a thing that Getty has, if you're writing about that thing, and if Getty actually lets you use that particular image, and you can use it in an iframe that might show ads and might show the picture too... don't hold your breath.

Here's the relevant section from Getty Images' Terms of Use:

  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/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.

Full terms here: http://www.gettyimages.com/Corporate/Terms.aspx

So, if you don'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/tumblrs use the images with attribution.

  "Look, if you want to get a Getty image today, you can find
  it without a watermark very simply," he says. "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's 
  what's happening… Our content was everywhere already."

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].

"And that's what's happening". Yes, and what happens next is that Getty Images places the misleading "royalty free" 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't apply here, yet with a deadline to pay up.

With claims of on average a few hundred Euro's vs damages of max. 20-30 Euros, many suspected that Getty profited heavily from having their pictures "everywhere already", preferably not with the original license intact, adding to the profitable confusion.

"Free to use" I don't believe in with this company. It wouldn't surprise me if heavy use of non-watermarked image embedding will lead to more spurious copyright infringement claims [2].

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.

[1] English source: http://excesscopyright.blogspot.com/2008/05/watching-getty-i...

[2] About Pic-Scout, their image crawler, not respecting robots.txt and being very difficult to block, search "picscout robots.txt"

I don't understand your point. Are you saying that people should be able to copy and paste whatever they find and photographers should starve? Seems as if Getty is exploring what could be a fine solution, that I'll probably use.

He's saying Getty in particular has a history and is known for using licence disagreements as a method to generate income. When they come to you saying "you can use these for free now…" he sees them not as extending an olive branch and being nice to people, but rather casting a large, wide net and seeing how many gullible people they can catch and squeeze money out of.

Pretty much. From source [1]:

  All rights holders are certainly entitled to enforce their
  legitimate rights in a legitimate way. But they should not
  be permitted to do so in a manner that is abusive and/or to
  misuse these rights.

>Seems as if Getty is exploring what could be a fine solution, that I'll probably use.

I would advise against this solution, over hosting your own images for some of these reasons:

- Accessibility issues: embedded images link target _blank to an unrelated page and source shows a lack of an alt-attribute and link description.

- Privacy issues: Embedding adds user tracking for Tumblr, Twitter and Getty Images. Unclear what is done with this data and which companies have access to it.

- Security issues: Embedding adds a third party website to your site, with all ability to execute code. Do you know for sure that Getty Images will disclose a hack, that their security is up to par with their target size?

- SEO issues: Google image results and iframed externally hosted duplicate images without a user-specifiable alt-attribute do not work well together. Furthermore you can't enrich your content with media, which may hamper web search results.

- Continuity issues: You won't know how aggressive, or low-quality the future advertisements will be. If your site happens to trigger for a porn related term, you run the risk of them bouncing your referrer (or breaking out of i-frame) for breaking their terms. Will you be notified if they discontinue an embedded image and what will the replacement content look like? How fast could you replace a few months worth of images if you want to switch?

- Legal issues: Their terms are clear. You can't use it commercially. So if you ever add advertising to your site or somehow monetize it, you run the risk of skirting the terms of service of a company that is known to aggressively litigate. You put your users at risk of downloading the image, hosting it somewhere, and getting fined, and you yourself probably run an increased risk, increased attention from Getty Images, when you embed their images. I know I would like to know what keywords appear on a page where my images are embedded, I know legal would probably like to add a PicScout scan to that crawler. BTW PicScout is known to report non-public placeholder images stored in hidden dev directories (http://www.extortionletterinfo.com/forum/getty-images-letter...)

"Privacy issues: Embedding adds user tracking"

This is the one that will probably stop me from using this after all. I've already gotten rid of tracking buttons on all sites that I control, so this would be a step backwards.

We have been doing embeds for about a year now, having Getty come in does excite us. Innovation in this space is definitely necessary - http://imgembed.com/

Most importantly we use flattened jpgs to facilitate responsive designs and current CMS auto-generated thumbnails while Getty uses iFrames.

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.

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.

You've got what appears to be a nice, fair model. As a user though I see that CPM pricing isn't shown upfront, but must be requested via email. So, say I embed an image on my site and realize after 3-6 months that it's close to hitting 10K views...what then? Would it be too complex to reveal a CPM pricing upfront?

We strongly encourage owners to set CPM prices on their images and a substantial portion of our images do. For example: http://imgembed.com/portfolio-image/johnnywestcoast/26237/im...

However some image owners have not set prices for their images and a 'Request for price' from a potential user usually gets them to set a price. We have built it so that by clicking the 'Request for price' button, an email automatically gets sent without additional user input.

Our business model is to take a 30% commission on premium sales and hence that also drives us to encourage image owners to set prices. I must admit however that due to the novelty of the format, prices vary, and we are researching pricing guidelines and hope this will help our image owners better gauge the price they should set their images at. Once you go premium however, there is a price lock so there is no need to worry about a price hike.

Thanks for that explanation.

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

Where commercial use is essentially undefined (except for obvious cases like advertising and directly selling the photo as a product).

In this case, commercial use has 2 meanings. 1- In any context where the image is used to support the sale or promotion of a product or a service. This is basically non-editorial use. Example: any image on a corporate website. 2- Put on any website that, although editorial, has enough visitors that people make a living out of it. This is the vague area you are referring to, am I right? Where is the frontier between a personal blog and a commercial one?

At CrowdMedia.co, we only allow editorial use for 2 reasons. You need model release for commercial use (from any recognizable person, brand, design, building), and a lot of photographers just don't want their photos in an ad for a company with what they consider wrong corporate values.

Correct. Non-editorial use is reasonably clear and, at least ostensibly in many cases, also requires model releases of the sort that stock photo sites require of photographers. As you note.

Non-commercial, as in "not related to making money," has never been well-defined and Creative Commons has consistently punted on this topic. Their last attempt to define it has been languishing for a good 5 years now. The problem is that if you eliminate all uses that encroach on money--e.g. an ostensibly personal blog that is related to my professional business in some way--you're left with uses that are essentially trivial. And, by the way, it doesn't really matter if there's no meeting of the minds about what constitutes commercial use and there probably won't be.

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'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.

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's "free" under creative commons, I would still do that instead.

http://search.creativecommons.org/

The images being embedded are of particularly low resolution - maximum size seems to be about 0.2 megapixels - so this free offer shouldn'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:

    <iframe src="//embed.gettyimages.com/embed/141707234?et=bk1OGlvTI0avNVbOUXa3ZA&sig=M0SraL8CHtualNed00tTEEcWOi7KfHFE17a3zoUlQBc=" width="508" height="407" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

with no protocol on the source attribute. Maybe this works in some browsers but it failed in Chrome. Adding the missing "http:" fixes it.

EDIT: please ignore this dumb comment but, if you are really interested, read the replies below.

This is a common pattern for embedding scripts, so the browser will use the same protocol as the parent page loading the element (http or https), avoiding issues with embedding insecure content in a secure page. I thought it worked for iframe elements too - but I guess it's not consistently supported? It works for me in Chrome on Win7.

Edit - more info about "Protocol Relative URLs": http://stackoverflow.com/questions/550038/is-it-valid-to-rep...

My bad. I tested it by loading a page from the local filesystem rather than over the network. It works fine as is, of course.

This is Adware for licensed material, like a Spotify for photos. It's not new, newspapers and magazines support their photo budget with advertisements.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adware

What bothers me at the moment is that photographers can'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.

I am often asked by photographers if we offer their photos for free at CrowdMedia (http://crowdmedia.co), 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.

I like Getty's initiative for small non-commercial blogs, but I don't think photographers should be the ones paying for it.

Wow, old media company finally gets it. I'm guessing they are going to benefit in the following ways:

1. Collect and sell analytics from embedded usage.

2. Up-sell and cross-sell to embedees.

3. Use this to promote their images to potential licensees.

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's just an experiment in the long run. Who is their competitor? Shutterstock? I guess they couldn't buy them.

Given that this has been available for years on Flickr (and others), Getty really doesn't have a choice if they want to stay the market leader.

Getty's competition is Facebook and Google. How many pictures does Instagram have these days?

> Getty's competition is Facebook and Google.

Ow! Burn on http://shutterstock.com eh? And here I thought it was a $3.5 billion company. :P

You obviously have little knowledge of the photography industry. Getty isn't some user-generated content farm. They typically represent some of the best images out there. Instagram isn't the place you go when you need a newsworthy image or something historical. The would be like using a Myspace blog post compared to something from the Ecconomist.

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 "soul-stealing" was an adjective used by a couple of folks...)

It is controlling still. You're not permitted to use the image itself, you have to use a javascript/iframe insecure embed with no idea what's on the other side.

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

If the link is in an iframe loaded from their own site, that's hardly a problem. And, I would guess they nofollow it anyway.

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

is this the work of a SEO link building genius?

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