Getty Images Announces The Termination of Their Partnership With Flickr

Almost 6 years ago Getty Images and Flickr announced a partnership that allowed Flickr members to sell stock images through Getty. Over 400,000 images were picked by Getty editors since the partnership started and made them available for commercial use. Today Getty Images officially announced they won't renew their agreement with Flickr and will part ways.

The biggest question was what will happen to all the contributors who were part of the program, and what will happen to their already-uploaded images. And Getty said they will keep selling all the images that are already in the system, and even better - they will let current contributors to keep uploading new images, just not through Flickr.

What this means to the Flickr-Getty contributors? Actually not much. It could be considered as good news, as the new-upcoming system will let photographers upload new images anytime they want and not wait for Getty editors to come across their work on Flickr and invite it. Photographers will potentially be able to upload and sell more images. The agreements between the contributors and Getty will stay the same, and photographers will receive royalties of 30% of any RM sale, and 20$ of any RF sale.

Earlier today Getty Images updated the contributors with an official statement on the separation: "Today we are announcing that we provided notice to terminate our existing agreement with Flickr. Our original agreement reached its end, and while we continue to be open to working with Yahoo!/Flickr, we have not agreed to a new agreement at this time.

Your status as a contributor to Getty Images is unchanged by this news. Your current agreement with Getty Images remains the same and agreements will NOT be terminated by us as a result of this change, no matter how few images you have on gettyimages.com.
For the last 5 years we’ve been very proud to provide a global platform for the work of Flickr artists, celebrating their originality and talent with our customers around the world. Those of us who are directly involved with the Flickr collection have thoroughly enjoyed and been inspired by our experience working within the Flickr community. Built to represent the best in authentic, spontaneous photography selected through social sharing, Getty Image’s Flickr collection has grown to be a tremendous success. We have never been more committed than we are now to expanding on what we’ve started together. "

If you are a Flickr contributor and you have images you're in the process of uploading to the Getty system, it is recommended you finish the process in the next few days to avoid any issues.