Yahoo and Getty Images announced a partnership today which will allow Getty to contact Flickr users and offer them to add their images to Getty’s collection. Getty would then license these images and offer them to its clients. A notworthy aspect of this program is that the photographer on Flickr simply has to wait to be contacted by Getty. There is no way to directly submit photos to this program.
Flickr members will receive between 20 to 40 percent of the licensing fee, depending on the terms of the license.
Flickr, unlike sites like deviantArt or SmugMug, does not offer its members the option to sell prints of their photos outright. Flickr, just like most of its direct photo sharing competitors, only offers its users the option to order prints for themselves.
Clearly, Flickr and Getty are going after more casual photographers here, who would not normally submit their work to Getty’s own iStockphoto or its competitors. Given the outstanding work that a lot of photographers post to Flickr, this relationship will probably be beneficial to both Flickr, as it can promote this opportunity to its members, and to Getty, which gets easier access to more photos.
This announcement is not going to make much of a difference to professional photographers, who would probably not want to rely on serendipity to have their photos found, but it would give casual photographers a reason to put their pictures up on Flickr instead of a competitor’s site.
As Thomas Hawk notes, it is interesting that Getty will put the Flickr images into a special “Flickr Collection” on its site. Getty’s own profession photographers are most likely not too happy to have amateurs compete with them on the same level, which would explain this firewall between the regular Getty collection and the Flickr collection.
In an interview with pdnonline, Flickr’s general managers Kakul Srivastava mentions that Flickr and Getty have a business relationship that goes beyond this deal, but declined to comment about the details. It will be interesting to see how this partnership develops over time.
