Getty Images vs. Flickr

excerpted from
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Getty Images vs. Flickr

Let’s take this a step further though and look at Creative. This is the side of stock photography where marketers go to get images to sell things.

Below are three searches that I selected at random. Las Vegas, candle and clouds. Now click through to the search pages for these terms at Flickr and at Getty Images. Which one is better? Is it clearly better? If you were a marketer would it make a difference to you which one you pulled your images from?

Las Vegas Getty
Las Vegas Flickr

Candle Getty
Candle Flickr

Clouds Getty
Clouds Flickr

Now let’s take this a step further and enter into the long tail of stock photography let’s do a search for Tujunga (a small town in the San Fernando Valley where I grew up) and Mount Tam (a local mountain in Marin here in the Bay Area).

Tujunga Getty
Tujunga Flickr

Mount Tam Getty
Mount Tam Flickr

Interesting what you get here isn’t it? You see with 400 million images in their library Flickr is the better stock agency for long tail stuff for sure. The problem just is that Flickr hasn’t figured out how to turn this on yet.

Publishing site Lulu partners with Getty Images

By Caroline McCarthy
<!– April 19, 2007, 7:02 AM PT
–>

Published: April 19, 2007, 7:02 AM PDT

Lulu.com, a site that lets members publish, print and sell their own books, has entered into a multiyear agreement with stock-photo giant Getty Images.

In this deal, Getty will provide its royalty-free–but still copyright-protected–image database to Lulu so that its members can use the contents in their self-published books, photo books and calendars. Lulu has emphasized the copyright-friendly nature of the agreement, explaining in a release that the high-resolution version of a Getty image is not “married” to a Lulu book until right before production. This way, according to Lulu, digital rights management restrictions on the stock images are honored.

Partnering with a company that specializes in copyrighted images is somewhat unusual for a company like Lulu, whose roots are definitively open source. The self-publishing site was founded by Robert Young, who co-founded Red Hat Linux along with Marc Ewing in 1994.

In addition to offering self-publishing on demand to members, Lulu has also sold titles from the Internet Archive’s Open Library, considered by some to be an open-source equivalent to Google’s controversial Library Project.

ulu touts 200,000 recently published titles with more than 5,000 additions each week. In addition to selling self-published books, the site also offers e-books, CDs, DVDs, and music and software downloads, with editorial and copyright control in the hands of the individual publisher. There’s no fee to publish on Lulu, but the site does take a commission from each sale.

The Getty database will be available to Lulu members beginning this summer.

FlickrCash similarly offers FREE, LICENSED images from Flickr TODAY

http://flickrcash.com

red flowers – made by FlickrCash

white flowers – made by FlickrCash

blue flowers – made by FlickrCash

orange flowers – made by FlickrCash

pink flowers – made by FlickrCash

NYC Tech Meetup mints some contenders

(excerpt from NYC Tech Meetup mints some contenders by: Oliver Ryan)

If Picture Dots is Web 2.0 tech whimsy at its most satisfying, FlickrCash could prove a real business. Founder Dr. Augustine Fou set out to build a more powerful search engine for the vast photo-sharing site and soon had created an AJAX-powered, multi-parameter search capable of returning easily-scanned, screen filling mosaics of thumbnails. For those that would use Flickr — with its millions of photographs (more than Getty Images or Corbis) — as a commercial source for photos, this power searching was great.

But the bigger problem was the lack of a legit purchasing mechanism. So, on top of his search engine, Fou has built what amounts to a peer-to-peer shopping cart. We’ve seen content mashups before, but this may well be the first pure e-commerce mashup: FlickrCash doesn’t host the photos or own them, it simply facilitates their retrieval and purchase. Way meta. Several in the audience raised the legitimate concern that Fou was forging a highly symbiotic relationship with Flickr-owner Yahoo (YHOO) without some form of commercial agreement. (Please to recall MySpace slapping cease-and-desist orders on various would-be “affiliates,” not to mention the recent Alexaholic scuffle.) Fou acknowledged the risk, but seemed undeterred. It’ll be interesting to see how Yahoo responds.

video transcript available at
http://augustinefou.blogspot.com/2007/04/ny-tech-meetup-april-3-2007-great-hall.html