This week saw Getty Images' first public move to integrate the recently acquired Photos.com and Jupiterimages Unlimited into the proverbial bigger picture. The plan was to augment the inventories of the two Web sites with some iStockphoto content. Despite iStock's atypically great relationship with its community and seemingly reasonable contributor terms, contributors' vehement anti-subscription and anti-Getty Images feelings almost immediately derailed the plan, at least for the moment.
Young New York and Geneva-based stock-footage marketplace Pond5 has reached 150,000 broadcast quality, royalty-free HD and SD clips. It has also added a free weekly HD stock clip offer.
Stock libraries have been moving to adopt social-networking technologies and Web sites. Microstock agencies, for whom the online community is an integral part of the business model, have naturally been the early adopters, integrating social-networking features into their own Web sites and using Facebook and similar services. Traditional agencies appear to be following a similar path; however, this adoption appears to be guided more by fad and novelty than tangible evidence of potential business benefits.
This year, Getty Images photographers and editors have earned more than 60 awards and honors for editorial imagery and multimedia productions. These include the Overseas Press Club's Robert Capa Gold Medal Award and Picture of the Year International's Magazine Photographer of the Year Award.
London-based Science Photo Library has announced that a new motion collection is coming this summer.
The Photolibrary Group has beat out a number of competitors to exclusively represent the image and video content of VisitBritain, the National Tourist Board of the U.K. The collection offers travel and lifestyle imagery of Britain.
New San Francisco-based photography site Snapixel markets itself as an offering that combines elements of Flickr and iStockphoto.