Free Images
We are living in a time when Artificial Intelligence is dramatically changing the way visual content is created. It may not be long before stock photographers are no longer needed to produce photos for commercial use. Photographers will still create photos for personal use and their own entertainment, but visual content for commercial purposes will be created by graphic artists using AI to tell the story and produce the effects their customer needs.
This story first appeared in German on
Robert Kneschke's website. Why photographers give away their pictures on platforms such as Pixabay remains mostly incomprehensible to me even after this article. Sometimes, however, the authors do not even know that someone else is illegally offering their images for free.
Adobe Stock has launched a
Free Stock Image Collection containing about 70K images (50K pictures, 15K Vectors and 6K video). The first version has been built from the work of a few top contributors who have a significant volume of images in the main collection.
An article in Popsugar says
stock photography has a diversity problem. According to the author more stock images of black and brown people are needed.
“Sheltering in Place” will certainly hurt many photographers. Photographers won’t be able to get out to shoot new images. Customers won’t be coming to your studio. You might be able to shoot still lifes in your home, but getting props may be difficult. So what can you do to pay your bills? One possibility, particularly if you have a large stock photo collection, is to check out
Canva and see if they will pay a one-time fee to purchase rights to a significant number of your images for inclusion in their Free collection that they make available to their Graphic Design customers.
When the question of market leaders in the stock photo industry comes up the names photographers usually think about are Getty Images, Shutterstock, AdobeStock, iStock and Alamy. Maybe they should be thinking about the Australian company
Canva. The users and buyers of photographs are people who design products that needs visuals. Canva has been built to provide a host of services designers need to do their jobs.
Free Images may not always be FREE. There are not only big legal risks for the users, but also potential time demands on users, creators and lawyers. Most users of Free images don’t recognize the risks they may be taking. One of the big questions for professional photographers is how to help those looking for free images to understand these risks.
On the iStock contributor forum Brenda Bazylewski of iStock contributor relations recently reported the following. “We (iStock) were recently made aware of the Chinese website, “
Xiaba” which was offering iStock imagery for personal educational use only, free of charge. According to the terms of their license, the imagery could not be used for commercial or editorial purposes."
Robert Kneschke’s story on
Unsplash last week got me thinking about trademarks and logos. Professional photographers tell me that the inspectors for the major stock agencies – Getty, Shutterstock, AdobeStock and iStock – are increasingly rejecting photos with any identifying brand marks for fear of legal action by the brands.
A while ago, I tried here to understand the business model of
Pixabay, who want to make money from free pictures. A similar company, but with greater international notoriety, is
Unsplash. In 2013, as a simple Tumblr blog, this company took the stage where 10 free pictures were shared. There are currently over 1,000,000 free images online, which have received a total of over 1,006,650,155 free downloads. These and many other exciting figures can be found here on the
statistics page of Unsplash.
Envato, headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, has solidified its place as one of the key players in the stock photography market with the acquisition of stock photo subscription service
Twenty20. The Los Angeles-based company that started out as
a way for people to print Instagram photos onto canvas, boasts more than 350,000 creative contributors to its library of more than 45 million authentic, crowd-sourced photos.
In the case of Jonathan Otto vs. Hearst Communications, Inc. in the Southern District Court of New York, Judge Gregory Woods has found that news organizations may not use personal images posted on social media without permission. In the event that personal images are use the infringer is legally liable to pay damages to the creator.
The images created by photographers who are trying to earn a portion of their living from their work represent very small minority of the total images that can be found on the Internet. Every day the number of images on the Internet that require licensing becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of the total. While there may be 2 billion unique images online that photographers have on offer for licensing, that number is a very small percentage of the total images available for viewing.
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.
On Saturday
Visual China Group (VCG) shut down
500px Marketplace and replaced it with a distribution partnership arrangement. China users will be able to license the images through VCG who
acquired 500px earlier this year. Getty Images will handle all licensing in the rest of the world.
Since its launch in 2013
Unsplash has been providing a platform where photographers can upload their images for the enjoyment of others. The photographers allow anyone to use their images for free, for any purpose and without credit. While the photo library only contains 400,000 photos (compared to the 180 million on Shutterstock), the company says it’s had more than 48 billion photo views and 310 million photo downloads since launch. Currently, it is seeing 10 photo downloads per second.
Recently, Owen Franken asked how I would deal with a request for personal blog use of an image. He receives such requests rarely. He received the following from Andrew Skladowski in Australia. See my comments on things to consider regarding such a request.
Tim Hinchliffe has reported on the
Sociable blog that Swedish stock image startup Pickit has announces its entry into the US market by establishing an office in Redmond, Washington to be closer to Microsoft.
Jim Domke, creator of the Domke Camera Bag, recently commented about my
Can Customers Find You article. He said, “Those searching for photos on Google or Bing are searching for FREE photos.” I disagree.
More and more photographers are willing to give their images away rather than trying to earn some revenue from their use.
Unsplash is one of many free sources for image. Can photographer who are trying to license rights to their images compete with the availability of free?
I just received a press release from
Envato Elements that offers “inspiring and ready-to-use photos, templates, fonts and assets” for $29 a month. They say Envato Elements “now includes 200,000 hand picked photos” from its
PhotoDune collection of 9 million photos. (Actually, there are currently 244,085 photos in the Elements collection.)
Dreamstime, with over 50 million stock images, and more than 16 million users has added 10,000 new images to its now 20,000 image library of free images available at
www.dreamstime.com/free-photos.?? Dreamstime also uses artificial intelligence-driven data from its companion site
Stockfreeimages.com to dynamically adjust recommended image content based on user preferences.
Editor's Note: I recently asked Chris Ryan of
CAIA Image to explain how their company came into existence as a stock photo production company, and how it operates. He sent me the following and said, "we are always looking for new contributing artists whose work we think is truly outstanding."
TechDirt reports that photographer Art Dragulis took a photo of
Swain’s Lock along the C&O canal in Maryland and uploaded it to Flickr. Roughly four years later, he discovered Kappa Map Group was using his photo for the cover of its Montgomery County, Maryland atlas. He sued for copyright infringement. And he LOST.
Have you gotten tired of reading all the “terms and conditions” on the social media sites? Or have you just given up and assumed they are OK. If you really read (and understand) all the terms on these sites is there any time left to engage on the sites? Is there any time left to take pictures?