With the addition of over 32,000 images from Omni Photo Agency and 18,000 images from the British Library picture archives
Universal Imaging Group’s (UIG) educational image database has grown to nearly 3 million still images and 100,000 film clips. Both of these organizations will be continually adding additional images of art, history, culture and anthropology to the collection.
UIG has also entered into an agreement with BBC Worldwide to represent, in the educational market, 40,000 film clips from with BBC motion library.
The UIG database also includes images from National Geographic Society, Photo Researchers, the Science Photo Library, the Natural Portrait Gallery, the Wellcome Trust Archives, De Agostini Editore, Amana Images, Getty Images and other image partners.
This collection of images is available to educational institutions through Encyclopedia Britannica’s Image Quest project. School systems license rights to review and download an unlimited number of images from the collection during the school year so long as they are used for educational purposes. Currently more than 200,000 students and instructors have access to Image Quest for the current school year. The number is likely to reach 500,000 by the beginning of 2012.
In addition, UIG’s international network of agents may represent the content for various types of uses. Omni’s content is available for education, editorial and in some cases creative uses. The BBC content is for educational uses only and the British Library content is available for education and editorial uses. Over 600,000 of the images in the UIG collection are high resolution rights managed images available for international representation in editorial markets.
Image Quest Revenue
Based on the Dallas school system numbers published
in June and assuming a total student population of 500,000, an agency with 32,000 of the images in a 3,000,000 image collection could expect to receive, on average, about $1,037 a year. The photographer’s share (we assume 50%) would need to be divided among all agency photographers whose images were accessed during the period.
Hopefully, the number of students with access to the database will increase dramatically above the 500,000 level and the per-student fee charged for access will also be increased.