What The Getty Images Announcement Means To Bloggers

Yesterday, Getty Images, one of the biggest photo agencies, announced that they would no longer be charging bloggers (etc) to use their images.

The logic behind this decision was that it was very easy for people who didn’t want to pay for the images to find a copy of a picture they wanted without the watermark on Google Images, because someone else had paid for it on a website.

To use it, just head over to gettyimages.co.uk, type in your search requirements, and when you find the image you want, click it (which will bring up a pop up), then click the embed button (that’s the little grey one that looks like </>)

This will give you a little dialog box with some code in that starts <iframe width= – paste this code where ever you need the image in your blog post (in the HTML view of your blog post), and it will appear like the image at the top of this post. You won’t be able to use just the image without the watermark, it will need to stay in the iframe, so the image can still keep the correct credit on there.

Why is this brilliant for bloggers? Remember a few weeks ago when we were talking about how to go to London Fashion Week? Getty Images opening up their gallery just made your job a lot easier – you’ll be able to access and use so many more images now, and you can search for things by the specific designer, or who is in the image, or even what sort of image it is (a full length shot? A close up of the model?)

Some photographers are unhappy about this because they say websites that would normally have paid for these images will no longer need to, but those websites may still decide to licence the images, and with the use of the iframe code (rather than giving you a image to download then upload to your blog), Getty can potentially bring in advertising later on to increase revenue. An interesting experiment, at least!