Getty Images has announced that as of January 1st 2014, they are dropping the placement fee for RM Photographer’s Choice. This means that there are no longer any fees associated with Photographer’s Choice RM and RF!
Getty’s contract photographers will be able to submit up to 20 RM images per quarter to Photographer’s Choice. Additionally, Getty will be increasing the quota for the RF PC collection to 50 RF images per quarter.
“With the elimination of placement fees, Getty’s policy on movement of PC images will revert to our standard house collection policy (applicable to images submitted from January 1, 2014 on forward /no fee). This means RM images that have had no sales activity for 3 or more years are eligible for review and possible movement to RF. By the same token a review of the PC collection from time to time may reveal images that are suited to one of the premium house collections so we will move in both directions,” the memo said.
Photographers may not submit images to PC that are similar to those that have already been accepted or are currently being reviewed for placement in other Getty Images collections or by another distributor.
We suspect the motivation for this move is that Getty contract photographers have basically stopped adding images to PC RM. Photographer’s Choice RM currently has 165,004 images in the collection. Add to that 108,149 images in PC RF and you get a total of 273,153 images for the total Photographer’s Choice collection.
We suspect that today Getty gets most of its new images from Flickr and distributors rather than from Getty contract photographers. The Flickr collection has a total of 832,175 images and has been growing much faster than Photographer’s choice.
The Getty RM and RF collections as a whole have 7,410,519 images. Thus, PC represents 3.7% of their total collection while Flickr represents 11% of the collection.
Another reason that photographers who have contracted with Getty directly, rather than through the Flickr arrangement, may have stopped submitting to PC is that the Flickr images are ranked much higher in the search-return-order than PC images.