Getty Images Gives Up, Makes Photos Available For Free

This is good news for bloggers.

Embed from Getty Images

 

As you can see, Getty Images offers its photos as an embed, which gives it more control over its content than it would have if someone just took the photo from somewhere else and posted it. Getty has tried to prevent this in the past by watermarking the images featured on its site, but that didn’t stop people from just downloading the photos from somewhere else.

As Getty’s senior vice president of business development Craig Peters told The Verge: ”Look, if you want to get a Getty image today, you can find it without a watermark very simply … 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.”

Rather than continuing its practice of filing copyright infringement lawsuits or sending out settlement demand letters (often to people like bloggers that didn’t have money to give Getty in the first place), Getty Images is giving options to use its photos legally (for non-commercial purposes) and making sure both it and the photographer get proper credit for their work.

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