Like it or not, Getty are certainly working hard at making the most of Flickr in terms of turning shared photos into stock photos. Last year the Getty-Flickr collection was announced and just as the number of images harvested for it hits 100,000 they announce a free for all Getty link up within the ‘Flickrverse’. This has effectively comercialised the whole of Flickr enabling any interested Flickr user to monetize their photostream via Getty Images.

However, Getty don’t have a complete monopoly on truning Flickr into a stock photography storefront. The Flickr API allows anyone with the necessary skills to build websites, apps etc that will link and synch with Flickr for all sorts of reasons. There is nothing to stop a stock photography agency setting up using this, or individual photographers creating a site for a ‘buy now’ type function for their images on Flickr. Clustershot is an example of a stock photography outlet that uses the Flickr API to allow its users to import their photostream into an ecommerce enabled site. Unfortunately they only offer RF licensing, but it shows what is possible. My previous post on  on Clustershot is here.

The saving grace in this latest move from Getty and Yahoo (as the owners of Flickr) is the fact each deal has to be run past the photographer first. Also, while no-one likes Getty’s cut, getting 20/30% of a sale you’d maybe never otherwise have made is obviously worthwhile. This brings up the obvious question; can it be done independently?

As I only have the grand total of 62 images on Flickr I can’t provide any meaningful experience. I have a ‘contact me’ to license note on my profile which should be the first obvious thing anyone prepared to license their work should do. A serious buyer would find this information if interested and dealing directly with a client wouldn’t, by the sounds of it, be much more work than liaising with a Getty editor on this scheme. The problem may be that buyers could prefer to deal with the known goliath of Getty than negotiate with individual photographers.

It is also possible to format the notes on your individual photo pages on Flickr so you can link to an Alamy image detail pages for instance. However, doing this on a large scale would be laborious and, I think, still technically against Flickr’s terms of service which don’t like overt commercial use of the site.

With so few images on Flickr the decision to be, or nor not to be, with Getty isn’t a big or pressing one for me at present. This really just bubbles Flickr back up to the surface of my thinking. For those of you with significant numbers of images on Flickr though a tempting offer has been made. What do you think?