A number of months ago, like many other photographers I responded to the Getty Images Call for Artists. As time passed I completely forgot that I had submitted images for approval and a number of days ago I received an email that opened with one of the best sentences I have read in a long time :

Congratulations! You are now part of a select group of photographers that has the opportunity to participate in the Flickr Collection on Getty Images.

With excitement I started the process of signing up as a Getty Images Participant. Although Getty preselect images from your collection this marks the beginning of a multi-staged approval process.

I dutifully completed the necessary releases and commenced with uploading the full sized, high quality images to Getty Images. Satisfied to have even got this far I titled, tagged and copyrighted the images and awaited the final approval process.

Getty Images are a global image stock photography company started in 1995 . The company offers a comprehensive library of creative and editorial imagery, micro-stock, footage and music.

So what does this actually mean ?

Well to be honest I am not really sure, on one level it creates a buzz of excitement and motivates to take more photographs yet also offering the chance to have my photos used in publications worldwide. Although there is the chance to make money it would be naive to think I’d ever make enough money to cover my equipment costs but the reality is FlixelPix isn’t about money.

So if you are wondering how it all works, Getty offer two licensing models, Rights Managed and Royalty Free.

Rights-managed (RM)

Rights-managed works are licenses on a use-by-use basis. Price of the license takes size, placement, duration of use and geographic distribution into account. (Getty Images has built a calculator for this.) Exclusive rights to work are available for some rights-managed products.

Royalty-free (RF)

Royalty-free images are licensed at set prices based upon the file-size the customer purchases. The end-use is not specified (though certain types of uses that are defamatory, pornographic or illegal are banned) so the customer has a lot of flexibility in how they use the images, and can use them multiple times.

I will watch with interest as to how it all works out, it would be great to have even one image used on the other side of the World in a print magazine but I guess it is very early days.

The FlixelPix Getty Image page is available here, it will take few weeks for all the images to appear but there is one live at the time of posting.

Links:
Getty Images