Submitting to Getty

Firstly apologies if you have seen this question before!

 

I have searched on this subject, however I stil can't seem to work out how to submit to Getty (UK). Is it possible?

 

Thanks

 

Nathan

The link should be somewhere under the Contact Us, For Photographers - or similar - heading. Then you fill out a form,

send a few sample pix and if they're interested they'll get back to you.

Try this: http://contributors.gettyimages.com/

Click on the link under "work with us".

Now, having found the link, what can you do to put yourself in the most favorable light? (No pun intended)

If you follow the links through you'll find a sentence which indicates that if you meet their technical and creative standards the most likely outcome is that they'll offer you a contract whereby you pay them $50 per image to have as many images as you want , unedited, put in a "Photographers Choice Placement Fee collection" at a cost to you of $50 per image. A new slant on the stock agency business I guess- I think most of us kind of expect our agencies to pay us! Seriously from their point of view maybe not such a bad tactic. They have so many images and so many photographers that they really don't need too many more. This approach will either serve to discourage photographers from applying, or to contribute directly to Getty's profits if their applicants confidence/ego makes them hard to dissuade. Seems to to be a little similar to vanity publishing, and no harm in it so long as you go into it knowing that probably most images in libraries don't ever make $50, and that their most serious customers might well not browse collections where Getty have done no editing.

There has been a similar fee-based program for years, called 'photographer's choice", with the differences that

to participate into it, you needed to have already a "proper" contract with them, and that the number of

submissions were limited. At the time of its creation, the average return per image at Getty was much higher than

the fee (making it a good business decision to submit the maximum number of allowed images), but as of late, it

has eroded significantly due to the dilution that is pervasive in the industry.

Try this link.

 

http://contributors.gettyimages.com/

Personally, I wouldn't link up with Getty... They are the 1000 lb gorilla of stock agencies, and tend to act like it.

 

But, that's just me.

 

No doubt you will get more traffic there. Getty gets at least twice what Corbis, in second place, does.. But your images will also be competing with more images than on any other stock agency site.

I work with Photoshelter. It's free to sign up and the photogs get 70% of their sales.

Percentages don't matter. The only numbers worth talking about are royalties per image per year. Smaller libraries tend to lack the global distributor based coverage that the top agencies bring, and so whilst royalty percentages are larger sales are often much lower. Problem is that few libraries seem able or willing to talk about commission per image/year, and I don't know personally any stock library whose editors make acceptance decisions aided by revenue per image data, or feeds such data to photographers to guide their submissions.