Search for your name on
Images.Google.com or
Images.Bing.com. You may be surprised at the results.
When I was working on the story on the
Bing Widget I decided to search to see what kind of photos were connected with my name.
There were a few photos of me, mostly old and unflattering. There were also a number of pictures I had taken that had been used on various web sites. A lot of them were probably unlicensed. But the most interesting thing was a huge number of photos, mostly of political personalities, that I had taken more than 40 years ago when I was covering the U.S. Congress.
All of these photos had a huge “
Image Collect” watermark. Over the years I have dealt with a lot of stock agencies, but never Image Collect. If fact, I had never heard of them. When I contacted them they told me that they got the images from
Globe Photos and that any revenue being generated from the images was being paid to Globe.
I had dealt with Globe for a short period of time in the 70s, but they produced almost no sales and very little money so I stopped dealing with them and, as I remember it, asked them to return my images.
I contacted Globe and discovered that they had 12 sales for a total royalty of $632.24 on account for me. A few of these sales were made in 1997 and 1998. There were also a couple of sales from Image Collect and the royalties on those were $0.12 and $0.24.
Then I got to thinking that there are some agencies I have dealt with that never bothered to pay me until I asked for payment. So I started checking then and I found one that I hadn’t supplied with any images for more than two decades that had $140 on account for me.
I have also asked that my photos be removed from the Image Collect site, but they are still up there.
The moral of this story is if you’ve been in business for a while there may be money out there just waiting for you to ask for it.