Finding images that can be used in a completely legal way is not easy for many small news sites and blogs, especially since having access to collections of photographs can cost a significant amount of money.
Getty has decided to help out the people who previously couldn’t afford to buy images or simply couldn’t justify the cost. In order to do this, Getty’s 35 million pictures will now be available to anyone that would like to embed them.
The only restrictions present with this new policy is that the images must not be monetized or used in a commercial setting and the embed code provided by Getty must also be used.
By using Getty’s codes, a copyright watermark is included on the pictures in order to still provide some credit to the photographers.
In order to begin using the 35 million photos, you can head over to the Getty images search page. Once you are there and have found an image that you would link to include on your website, hover over the photo to see if it can be embedded (some are currently unavailable.) If the image can be embedded, use the “</>” code that Getty provides and then add that to your post.
As Getty points out, the vast majority of its images are already available somewhere online without a watermark. Although this is technically illegal, it is a common practice, and just as we have seen with movies, games, and music, if something can be found for free, people are bound to navigate towards that option. At least by providing a free way to embed the pictures, Getty can still benefit.
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. – Craig Peters, business development, Getty
Summary: Instead of asking for a payment in order to have access to its images, Getty will be opening up its massive collection of pictures for free. The images can be embedded for non-commercial uses only.
Image Credit: yonieyal