Articles by Jim Pickerell
Recently, I received a call from the developer of a real estate website who is looking for a picture researcher to help him find images to illustrate the stories he will publish on his website. He is looking for “free” pictures, but has determined that it takes too much time, and is too much hassle, to do the research on the free sites himself. He is willing to pay someone to do that research, but not pay for the photographs.
The New York Daily News a daily tabloid newspaper founded in 1919, and as of May 2016 the United States’ ninth-most widely circulated daily newspaper, eliminated the jobs of all 10 staff photographers as of July 23, 2018. In addition to the photographers two photo editing staff positions were also eliminated.
Photographers know they must have signed model releases for any non-news pictures they want to offer for licensing as stock photos. Commercial stock agencies like Getty Images or Shutterstock won’t accept photos unless they are accompanied by a signed release. But, do the photographers, or the models have any idea how the pictures might be used?
Caution! Don’t let any of your models read
The Indian Express story about Shubnum Kahn’s modeling experience.
Shutterstock has reported Q2 2018 revenue of
$156.6 million up $22.6 million or 16.9% compared to Q2 2017. (The comparison excludes the 2017
revenue from Webdam which was divested in Q1 2018.) Revenue per download averaged
$3.41 per image, an increase of 12% over Q2 2017. (Much of this growth is probably due to increased sales of video content offered at much higher prices than still image content.)
Getty is contacting its RM photographers with non-exclusive or co-exclusive agreements and asking them to convert all their images in the Getty collection to exclusive so Getty will be the only organization that can license rights to use the images. This may be a particularly difficult decision for photographers with co-exclusive arrangements if they typically license a fair number of uses directly to clients annually. All those future sales will be lost.
According to
The Takeout Anheuser-Busch has launched two Royalty Free collections of stock images featuring properly served beer, with diverse consumers and brewers, and myriad beer styles all found in contemporary settings on the free sites
Pexels and
Unsplash.
I was asked recently if I had a breakdown of the stock images uses by various categories of industry users. The answer is NO, and as far as I know no one else has done that type of analysis. However, it occurred to me that it might be useful to develop some broad general ideas of what the breakdowns might be.
Sheron Resnick of 20/20 Software has sent a brief note with very cogent arguments as to why my ideas for an
Image Creator Locator are impractical and probably won’t work. In this story I would like to examine some of her concerns and criticisms and offer some thoughts on each of the issues mentioned.
The biggest problem for the stock photography industry today is that in order to make customers aware that photos exist they must be online. Once online, anyone can easily grab and use them.? If the image is on the photographer’s, or a stock agency site, most users would infer that they should contact the photographers or agency and ask permission. But, more often than not, the picture is seen on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram or some other site. No one, just looking at the image is sure whether it can be legally used or not. And if it should be licensed where to go to do that.
The legal definition of “Fair Use” is open to a lot of interpretation by courts. in
Brammer v. Violent Hues Productions, LLC, a Northern District of Virginia court recently found in favor of Fair Use. If this decision becomes legal precedent then photographers should assume that if one of their images can be found on the Internet, or anywhere else, anyone can use it for free.