Getty Images
The Flickr Collection on Getty Images
So, the major image selling and licensing company Getty Images recently teamed up with Flickr and started taking advantage of all the great photographers out there using Flickr to share and show off their photography. I've seen alot of talk about this on Flickr about this and different photographer's asking how they can sell their work on Getty, but its not that easy....Getty needs to come to you. So, recently Getty created a group on Flickr for interested photographers to submit their images for concideration. As per their website, they describe it as this:
Help us grow the collection by submitting your incredible photos to the Getty Images Call for Artists group. The Getty Images creative team reviews photos in the group, looking out for images they feel are marketable based on their expertise, and invites new photographers to join.
The cool part about this...I haven't submitted a single image to this group, and they have now asked me for over 50 images, which they originally contacted me about through email. I was given an account and they just email me every time they add an image to the list. I look at this way...for them to approach me without having ever submitting anything, and for them to continually ask for more and more of my images as I post them on Flickr, I take it as a compliment. As far as actually submitting the images they request...well, they first approached me over 6 months ago, I just submitted my first image today as you can see my account below.
There is a lot involved in having the images approved to be available for licensing, including submitting very high resolution images (which I dont always have just lying around), signed release forms for anyone that may be in the image (which can be a little hard when most of the images they have chosen are from Guatemala), and then once all that is done I need to also remove any watermarks that I have on the image. So, needless to say, this can be a very annoying and frustrating process, which is why I have ignored Getty's email requests for over 6 months now.
The other down side to this is that once an image is bought, it is now the buyer's image and they now own all the rights to it, meaning I can't ever do anything else with the image, such as hang it in a gallery or sell it somewhere else. So, I have to be very careful with which images I decide to submit to them.
Im not sure where I was able to find the time to officially submit them, but today I submitted a total of 10....1 has been approved so far for sale and the other 6 should follow right behind sometime today. I have spoked to a few other photographers that have submitted their images on Getty and say that they have been pleasantly pleased with the extra income it has generated. Im not so much doing this for the extra income, although that is always a nice bonus, Im doing it strictly for extra exposure. I'll keep everyone posted on how my new friendship with Getty goes. Wish me luck.