Getty’s Images Are Now Free for Twitter, Tumblr and Personal Blogs

By: Raymond 0 comments

Since its founding, Getty Images has charged for its photos. If a media company wanted to use a Getty photo, the company paid Getty for the rights to that photo. But the Seattle stock-photo agency noticed its photos increasingly appearing on social media and blogs that hadn’t paid for the rights—one result of images being easy to find in Google Image searches and on news sites.

So the Seattle-based stock-photo agency has decided to make a huge portion of its photos free. On Wednesday, the company unveiled the embed tool, which will allow users to include images on websites, such as non-commercial WordPress blogs. The eligible images also come with buttons for Tumblr and Twitter, where a link to the image can be shared. (The image itself doesn’t appear on Twitter, however.)

Here’s how it works for blogs:

1. Select the image you want to use in your blog or social-media post from the huge portion of images available to embed.
2. Click on the <> symbol.

• In the embed window that pops up, copy the embed code
• Paste the HTML code into the source code of a website or blog or wherever you want it to appear.