Thomas Hawk

"Given that, at least initially, this Getty Collection will only include 2,500 images I seriously wonder how meaningful or significant an effort this will be. It would seem to me that 2,500 images would hardly represent a meaningful economic effort to Getty, Yahoo or the photographers involved. It also makes me wonder how the community at Flickr might react to this deal. With likely far more photographers at Flickr interested than might be room at the inn for, I would suspect that many Flickr photographers who are not selected for this program might feel slighted at not being included. Even if the initiative only included a single image from 2,500 Flickr photographers, I'd think that there would still be many unsatisfied and very talented Flickr photographers left out in the cold." - Thomas Hawk via Bookmarklet

I would assume that it would take a lot of time and effort to pull together such a collection. It will be an ongoing process but they have to start somewhere so an initial offering of 2,500 images seems reasonable to me. - Fraser Smith

Fraser, the problem that i forsee is that a lot more flickr photographers will want to be involved and want to make money than there is room for. There are so many amazing images on Flickr and I think some very talented photographers might get frustrated at not having as meaningful of an opportunity as regular Getty photographers. - Thomas Hawk

Let's hope that the initial 2500 is only a pilot test and if successful, Getty will expand the offering and inclusion of many more photographers in the future. If the Flickr images 'brand' turns out to be popular a seller, than Getty would be silly not to expand it significantly. I'm sure they are staying mum on what the future holds until they know how well these images will be received by their high end client base. - Jeff P. Henderson

Just received a clarification email from Bridget Russell at Getty Images. According to Russell, the 2,500 photos at launch number that was presented today by Dube is not in fact correct. "You have in fact been given an incorrect number. We intend to launch our Flickr collection in the coming months with tens of thousands of images, with thousands more added to the collection each month." - Thomas Hawk

That is much better news. Sounds like they may already know that the images they choose to sell will be good sellers. - Jeff P. Henderson

Thanks for the update Thomas...sounds much more inciting now. Looking forward to see how it all unfolds. - Justin Korn

glasses make people look smart - Ryan

Thats pathetic. I was really unimpressed with the phrase "Flickr corpus." - it says a lot about how they think of photos and photographers. They're just trying to co-opt social media before it demolishes their business model completely. - Owen Byrne

I'm sure a lot will be interested but, they've got to start somewhere and sometime so I assume they have to draw the line at a certain number and, as you've now said, expand after that. It'll be interesting to see what physical characteristics will be required of a photo before it will acceptable. How many Flickr photographers upload full resolution images? In my experience, many resize before uploading. Most stock libraries tend to reject anything that wasn't taken with a hi Megapixel count DSLR. ... - Fraser Smith

I think it's great. I use Getty a lot, and the reason is simple: their tools for discovering and finding images make it quicker and easier than spending hours trawling through Flickr. Their tagging and categorisation is consistent, which means I get fewer false results, which means less wasted time - and my time is expensive. So a system which pulled images from Flickr and ensured that the tagging and categorisation was consistent and professionally done would be something well worth paying for. - Ian Betteridge