Getty Images and Flickr are working together to establish the first commercial licensing opportunity for photo-enthusiasts in the Flickr community. The Flickr collection will feature photography selected by Getty Images editors based on their expertise in licensing digital content and insights into customers’ needs. In the next several months, Getty Images will begin inviting selected Flickr members who will have the choice to participate in the collection.

So normal Flickr fans won’t likely see any difference but those who have made a big name on Flickr already might well get selected to be a part of the collection.

While it is a good first step, but let’s see an option where we can all get involved, eh? Apparently “Getty customers usually pay between $29 and $200,000 for an image, depending on how freely they may use it.”, I am sure there are a lot of us who would like in on that kind of action even if it is a slim chance any of our pictures will sell.

It’s clear where the opportunity for Flickr and their users is, and Getty gets access to a bigger inventory. There could be some political fallout for Getty though. As Thomas Hawk says My own expectation would be that current Getty “Pros” are probably none too happy about having a new horde of “amateurs” jointing their ranks and competing with their own image sales.

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at Zooomr we are in the process of building what will soon be the world’s largest stock photography agency. We think we can pay photographers out 90% and still operate our business. We also are going to let photographers set their price on their images between $5 and $1,000 for royalty free images.

That looks like a great deal, and in fact has made me search in vain for my Zooomr login details

One question I have, that will obviously become crystal clear, is if they will find paying customers …

Tags: micro, stock, photography, news, zooomr, thomas hawk

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Here is a titbit from Thomas Hawk’s blog

One of the things we want to do at Zooomr is to help the pro/am photographer monetize their photostream within the photosharing space

Out of everything else going for Zooomr that could be one reason to switch. Zooomr doesn’t offer me anything to set my world alight so I would much prefer Flickr to offer this but if they don’t then Zooomr might be worth a try.

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Carl Purcell is a travel photographer whose art has graced publications ranging from National Geographic and U.S. News and World Report to travel sections in The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Still, an online archive at corbis.com is home to 12,800 of his more than 300,000 photos and is a primary source of income for him. One popular photo alone — of palms blowing in a typhoon in the South Pacific — has netted more than $25,000, Purcell says. But this 77-year-old retiree’s most famous image — a billowing American flag merged with the Statue of Liberty — appears on a 39-cent stamp. [..] Unfortunately for Purcell, the 8-year-old image credited to him and his former wife, Ann, was one of a handful of royalty-free photos available from an Internet archive. “The only payment I got for it was a check for $150,” he says ruefully.

So his art has found success, he has even made a bunch of cash ($25k is not to be sniffed at unless you just happen to be the hobby digital photographer called Bill Gates), and his picture even graced a stamp for goodness sake, success! Wouldn’t you feel you had been kicked in the nuts every time you received some mail stamped with your now bargain-basement image?

Thing is they probably wouldn’t have seen let alone used his image had it not been in there and how many people can claim to have had their photographs seen by as many people?

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Call me a naysayer, but this doesn’t seem like a way to make money. I’ve always made money by differentiating myself. Stock is the antithesis of differentiation. Say “NO!” all you want to royalty-free websites like istockphoto.com and the royalty-free discs of several years ago, but so long as enough photographers say YES! to submitting to these folks that will set the market price. This is exactly why I’m too chicken to mess with stock: enough others submit their work for nothing, so no one is going to pay me any more.

When I worked for a marketing agency there were quite a few occasions where stock photography was used but that tended towards those projects where the budget was low, deadlines were tight and the picture requirement was very generic. Other than the top stock libraries like Getty that have some real top photographers on their books, I think the stock photography that Ken is so against is the domain of the “$10 template” website hack, they are not his market anyway.

It is tempting to think I could make a passive income from stock photos but I can’t see me getting up the enthusiasm to take photographs JUST to submit to a library. If someone was to come along and ask to purchase rights to use a picture that would be a completely different proposition.

Having said that, there is a lot of people making money and having fun. Don’t knock it till you have tried it, I just might give it a go.

Technorati Tags: stock, photography, news

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Will Flickr Enter The Commercial Stock Photography Business?

Flickr/Yahoo recently announced in the category Product/General Management two new interesting vacancies for a Product Manager A and a Product Manager B, which raises the question if Flickr will enter the commercial stock photo market in the not too distant future, with selected and rights cleared images of its huge image library.

I hadn’t thought about things like model releases, and all that legal stuff, but I am sure if companies are making a profit selling stock photography with far less technical savvy, legal support or investment as Flickr then the boys from Flickr/Yahoo! could crack it.

Technorati Tags: flickr, stock, photography, news

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Does Middle America know to go to Flickr and do a search for birthdaycake and then to change the view to sort by interestingness to get some kick ass photos of birthday cakes for the homemade card that you are going to make for Aunt Betty? (beachycat, that’s a kick ass photo of those candles). Of course not. But they do know to go to Yahoo! image search and type in Birthday Cake and find an image. And they do know that if all of the photos of Birthday cakes on Yahoo Image Search suck (which they all do by the way) that they can go to Google Image Search and search for birthday cakes there (and they still suck).

BUT, he goes on to say he thought about creating his own Web2.0 stock photography company. Here’s the thing, we have one right there in Flickr, you don’t need another company. Flickr just need to add that functionality to their own system.

At present there is a large, tagged, ranked database of great photography. IP rights are applied at varying degrees. How hard would it be to add another layer where you can mark an image so you can only get full size if you pay for it? Family; tick, Friends; tick; Customer; tick. Also it wouldn’t be too tricky to have an option where other sizes are watermarked even.

Many of the people I talk to who use Flickr have the images on Alemy, etc. There could be some mega revenue in there, why are they focussing on the consumer aspects when they could commercialise the images for those who want it?

Flickr could be a kick-ass stock photography library.

Technorati Tags: flickr, stock, photographs, photography, news

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