Getty's New Watermark

http://www.gettyimages.com/Creative/Frontdoor/NewWatermark

by tortilla • 14 years ago

296 132 14 years ago

gettyimages.com

ojilles• 14 years ago

Another site that takes IP address to force the language, even after chaning it back to .com. Sigh.

ben0x5392• 14 years ago

I don't even have a non-english language listed in my browser preferences.

Apparently they expect people to use their javascript widget to select a home country, and then send you to e.g. http://www.gettyimages.com/Creative/Frontdoor/NewWatermark?L...

Wilya• 14 years ago

This links redirects me to the local language version with the Language=mylanguage in the url. This is beyond annoying.

pbhjpbhj2• 14 years ago

It sent me to the en-GB language page (correctly) but I have noscript on so I'm guessing they did that via browser header, the selection in the top-right showed "international" though.

FWIW http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/Creative/Frontdoor apparently gives some details about the server, the directory structure and the auth system in place that might not be worth exposing to external IP addresses.

geetee• 14 years ago

Why not have the info box AND a real watermark?

greghinch• 14 years ago

What would the point be? I think this brilliantly satisfies the requirements of a watermark while also achieving a simple usefulness. This is where design reaches its peak, when functional requirements, practical use, and pleasing aesthetics meet. Well done Getty

shortformblog3• 14 years ago

By making it minimalist, they're attempting to make it so that it doesn't intrude on the photos.

So, that way, if someone, say, shares the photo on Pinterest, it isn't a total loss for them. I can see the theory behind not giving it so much noise.

ben0x5392• 14 years ago

If see a thing of the form <three letters>.<two letters that aren't a country I know>/<newline><huge number>, it doesn't really occur to me that it's supposed to be a URL. Doesn't help that in their big example image, the "gt" of gty.im kind of blurs into the bright bit of the image it is laid over.

Apart from the pet-peeve of the missing http://, is splitting URLs across lines a thing now?

ceol• 14 years ago

I dunno. I immediately saw it as a URL, because honestly, what else would it be?

megablast• 14 years ago

I thought it was a product code.

Sparragus• 14 years ago

Getty Images is all over the web. And while initially it might be like you say, I think it will eventually become some sort of branding that people will learn to use.

there• 14 years ago

http://? What's that? My Firefox and Chrome don't show that.

mistercow• 14 years ago

It's a functional programming thing; stands for "Haskell Time To Party". It might sound funny, but it is very, very serious and esoteric.

miahi2• 14 years ago

This week a coworker and I (more than 10 years of admin experience each) spent 15 minutes wondering why one internal web server was not reachable from a specific computer. Turned out that we got so used working with Firefox and Chrome that we forgot IE8 doesn't understand an address like IP:port/ if you don't specify the protocol (http://IP:port/).

powertower• 14 years ago

The watermark is primarily for the web-developers and web-masters that have not yet paid for a licensed copy of the image and are just marking things up on the page.

If you're smart enough to find the image, download it, embed it in your website, you're smart enough to figure out the rest.

It's not ment to be used on a production/deployed website to drive traffic to getty. It's just a reminder to you.

bmelton3• 14 years ago

So, as I just learned recently, the <huge number> is their 'Creative ID'. People who use Getty images enough know that they can just track that number and look up images from Getty.

So, in a sense, you're right. It is both a URL and a 'product code'.

techietim• 14 years ago

I just typed in the address listed on the sample image and, due to the contrast between the text and the image, mistook it as "gly.im". Did anyone else notice this?

callmevlad• 14 years ago

I noticed the same thing. The typeface choice makes it easier to confuse "t" and "l".

bpowah2• 14 years ago

What do they do for almost-white images? Hopefully at some threshold they switch to black test. Even at that, a black/white tiled checkerboard image would leave the url illegible. They should have outlined the white text in black.

Also, it looks fairly easy for an "unfair use"-er to "heal" the watermark away. They should consider a watermark with higher entropy. (like a stipple-shaded box or one with subtle random variation in shade around the box edge.)

mceachen• 14 years ago

Looks like the background is adaptive:

http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/chiufen-village-high...

bpowah2• 14 years ago

Yes, they clearly thought thru the white-image issue: http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/ice-extreme-close-up... The box is just a low-contrast region (not adaptive). But I still think there will be lots of conditions where it will be tough to read. http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/chess-board-royalty-...

AndrewNoNumbers• 14 years ago

You, sir, are clearly thinking like an engineer.

miahi2• 14 years ago

You don't really need a higher entropy. It's enough to have a strong enough shade, so the shaded part loses enough color information that when you undo the shade that part looks posterized. That way an "attacker" needs to work a lot more on the picture, as it's not easy to add the lost color information again without adding a blur to that part.

grkvlt• 14 years ago

If you register and log in, you get a watermark-free image. It even suggests this on the image info page...

billpatrianakos5• 14 years ago

Wow, as of this writing the vast majority of comments are just so negative! Do we have to hate on everything? I like it! It looks way less tacky than their old watermark. In fact, it actually makes the photos look better compared to the old watermark and others' watermarks. They did a great job and they're not dummies. I'm sure a lot of thought went into how this would look or change when it was laid over light, dark, or patterned photos. Kudos to them. Getty Images preview photos now look way more attractive.

StavrosK• 14 years ago

I don't know what all the negativity is about, I think it's a brilliant move that both serves its purpose for Getty, gets them more eyes to the actual images and is less of an eyesore and more informative to the viewer than just a logo.

billpatrianakos5• 14 years ago

I hate start meta discussions about HN but I think the negativity has a lot to do with the community changing a bit around here. The thread about DuckDuckGo a few days back exemplifies this and there was a discussion of it just yesterday. Basically, people want to be heard and the best way to do it is to be a contrarian.

A few years back I joined HN and was so intimidated by all the smart people here that it took a long time before I started commenting. Now, if you're not paying attention it's easy to mistakenly assume that the smart people "know better" and will comment with their opinions on how they'd do XYZ better. A lot of the threads I saw back then had people giving contrarian opinions and getting lots of attention for it. So for the newbie it's most likely easy to assume that's how things are done around here and that's how you prove your intelligence/expertise. But the thing is, what often looks like a contrarian view is often a question or an alternative way to do XYZ that isn't really saying XYZ is bad or wrong at all.

So I think it's a case of monkey see monkey do mixed with a misunderstanding of popular comments, who their authors are, and missing context. Everyone wants to be the smartest person in the room. HN can be an intimidating place because of how seriously exceptional a lot of people around here are. Hell, I still feel like a moron half the time when I comment. Egos get in the way of accepting that instead of being the smartest you should learn from the smartest and seeing that you don't have to say anything at all. In fact, saying nothing is often the smartest thing to do. How does that saying go? Something like "Shut up and let people assume you're stupid instead of opening your mouth and confirming it"?

gjulianm• 14 years ago

The only problem I see with this new watermark is that it takes too much space. It's too tall for me, it could be shorter. But it's just a tiny detail, I love the concept and the design.

freditup• 14 years ago

It's actually a square interestingly. Just glancing at it, I felt it was taller than it was wide. Had to measure twice to believe it was a square :D

vacri• 14 years ago

The text also needs to be outlined - you can see how it becomes hard to read when in low-contrast/light areas of the photo.

mambodog• 14 years ago

You know what the purpose of a watermark is, right? The old one covered the whole image.

Devilboy• 14 years ago

Ripping everything apart is what HN is all about. Look at any random article on the front page and tell me I'm wrong.

billpatrianakos5• 14 years ago

I'm telling you you're wrong. It's more about intelligent discussion and learning a thing or two than ripping everything apart. Going into anything with that mentality automatically stops you from learning anything. The front page you see may give you that impression but it's definitely not the intention.

pg2• 14 years ago

Analysis is what HN is about. Meanness is not. The former can easily degrade into the latter, but we're fighting a constant battle against that tendency.

kibwen• 14 years ago

This watermark takes up way too much of the image, but I suppose that's the whole point; they don't want to make it easy to crop out the attribution.

This may seem like an intractable tension, but I don't think it necessarily has to be--at least not in the following situation:

1) The content creator cares more about attribution than monetization.

2) The content sharer cares more about sharing unobstructed images than about passing off the content as their own original creation.

In this case, there could be some sort of standard metadata that accompanies the image and is only displayed upon some user interaction, such as a mouseover. We could even use steganography[1] to do this right now, without needing to settle upon a new image format.

I realize this is a bit too idealistic to be taken seriously. Just interesting to think about, is all.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

JimmyL5• 14 years ago

For these images, the content creator is Getty ("they" didn't press the shutter button, but they paid for the shoot and own the images) - and they certainly care more about monetization than attribution.

igouy2• 14 years ago

SignMyImage -- Protect your images from copying by invisible watermarking.

http://www.adptools.com/en/signmyimage-description.html

jonhendry2• 14 years ago

"1) The content creator cares more about attribution than monetization."

I wouldn't bet on that, if you're talking about a professional photographer.

gbog2• 14 years ago

I don't like it.

There are three purposes mixed in this "watermark":

a) Give the innocent viewer a way to know the name of the photograph and go the original source of the image, maybe to buy the picture.

b) Make it harder for less-than-innocent people who want to take these images and use them for illustrative purposes without people noticing they did not actually take these pictures.

c) Inject a fingerprint in these images so that can serve as a proof of ownership in case of legal issue, and that may also help crawling the web searching for them.

For a), it seems much preferable to have a classic caption, where more useful information may fit (date, place, etc)

For b), with my limited gimp skills, I guess I would need 30 minutes to remove the watermark the first time, and then it would take 2 minutes.

For c) I suppose a real invisible watermark is actually much harder to erase and a better proof of ownership, but maybe they do add such a fingerprint also?

Anyway, I see here yet another contradiction of DRMs: content provider want more and more people accessing their content for free, but they also want, at the same time, this access to be unpleasant enough so that these users would buy the paid content. I don't think this scheme will survive in the long-term.

shortformblog3• 14 years ago

You realize that Getty Images used to have much uglier watermarks, right?

Example: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/58607934/stuff/getty.jpeg

So in other words, option b and option c has always been on the table. However, we're in an era where images are becoming much easier to share on other platforms. All someone has to do to share a picture these days is to pin it or post it on Tumblr. All that metadata gets stripped when people do that. At least with this, people know where to find it.

Considering the changes in sharing images, why wouldn't Getty want to take advantage of this? That way, if people are going to share them anyway, at least it isn't a total loss to them — and hey, people might even be more likely to share them because it doesn't have a supremely ugly watermark.

Media outlets pay $100 — each — for many of these photos. This a big business for Getty, so they need to protect it. Now, Getty could do things to make it easier for smaller entities — say, bloggers — to take advantage of this. This feels like a good, if imperfect, compromise.

Now you might be willing to use GIMP to modify a photo, but most people won't. It's why Adobe can charge $600 for Photoshop. Too expensive? You're not their target market.

This isn't to say there's not a better way, but it just feels like we're wringing our hands over what seems to be a good-faith effort to improve something which previously hindered the experience.

gbog2• 14 years ago

You say "much uglier" but this is a subjective judgment, right? In fact if I had the choice I may prefer the previous one, they may have a less annoying influence on the original photo.

weinzierl2• 14 years ago

Just as a remark to your point c: A watermark (visible or invisible) provides neither proof of ownership nor does it help crawling the web searching for the watermarked artifact.

Anyone can add a watermark to an image, regardless if they are the owner, creator, copyright holder or whatever.

Anyone can even add a getty watermark to an image. This is called a copy attack and it's the reason why the watermark is not very useful for identification by a crawler. A getty watermarked image could be a real getty image or any image someone inserted a getty watermark. In other words you could sort of DoS the getty crawler very easily.

Digimarc had an interesting research paper on their website about this topic but unfortunately it had been removed. In 2011 I wrote an email to Digimarc customer support asking if their newest watermarks are still vulnerable to a copy attack and the answer was: "There are hundreds of applications and specific use cases for digital watermarking as I'm sure you found in your research. Some of our published papers describe theories and some describe applications and solutions that are available for license today as end-user products. "

EDIT: Found the Digimarc paper http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#....

jonhendry2• 14 years ago

A Getty crawler would have access to all the images that really are Getty images, making it fairly easy to identify a non-Getty images with fake Getty watermarks. Some sort of hashing function, perhaps, or something like tineye uses.

Since these new watermarks include a URL that identifies the Getty stock number of the photo, someone trying to fake that would end up putting a bogus stock number on the watermark, which makes it even easier to ignore fakes. The fake watermark would either use a number that doesn't correspond to a Getty picture at all, or a number that points at a different image.

officemonkey3• 14 years ago

This is seriously better than the old "gettyimages" watermark. And it's a very thoughtful way to get traffic back to their website. It (almost implicitly) expects people to use and share the watermarked image.

I predict a greater use of watermarked images and greater traffic back to Getty Images.

rorrr• 14 years ago

They could've made shorter URLs if they used numbers and letters (base 36).

mayanksinghal• 14 years ago

Not sure if there are any comparative studies about it, but aren't random numbers a lot more readable than random alphabets (with numbers)? I have read people raise this issue with IPv6. Choosing to use just numbers seems like a good idea to me.

matt312• 14 years ago

The short URL link isn't just random, it correlates to the image's "Creative Image Number".

Maro3• 14 years ago

Those pictures look really nice, so I clicked through to see how much it would cost to use them on a website. It asked me all kind of bullshit questions like which industry I want to use them in, whether it's a site or an ad, TBH I don't think there's even a good way to answer their question. At the end it gave me a quote of $160 to use the image for a 1 month period. What a joke.

pvarangot2• 14 years ago

Are you at least moderately aware of the average costs and profit margins for that kind of photography? u$d 160 a month is sort of on the cheap side for the kind of images in that landing page, specially if you are thinking about the katana one. And of the stock photo services, Getty is by far the one that treats the photographers with most respect and compensates them very competitively.

GoodIntentions3• 14 years ago

Getty isn't after anyone that thinks 160 is expensive. They're after companies/individuals that understand 160 is much cheaper than paying 1+ professional for n hours to "maybe" get a usable shot.

Having said that, the profusion of really really good modestly priced pro-am cameras has spawned an ugly race-to-the-bottom on stock photography. You can get ( often quite good ) stock photos for next to nothing from the low cost stock photography sites.

To put it in HN parlance, Getty's model has been thoroughly 'disrupted'.

Maro3• 14 years ago

To answer your question, no I'm not. My major problem was with the problematic question about the license, which I feel are impossible to answer precisely for an average small business owner with 5 minutes on his hand, which then leads to a situation where I pay a lot of money for an image but still may be violating their copyright, because I misunderstood their questions. Also, I really don't think these images are 100x better than the ones on iStockphoto, but they cost 100x more. But, if their business model is doing well, then who am I to comment on it.

kenrikm• 14 years ago

There are other cheaper alternatives example: Bigstockphoto = $1 - $8 per image/use (if you use credits)

However Getty does have some really nice images!

rrreese• 14 years ago

Exactly you are paying for quality, and rarity. Not many cheap stock photo agencies have archive photos of US presidents: http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/Search/Search.aspx?EventId=1075...

slig• 14 years ago

Keep in mind that they're really big, and their clients are huge companies with deep pockets.

There're a lot of cheaper alternatives with a very direct pricing. See for instance: http://photodune.net/

Gring• 14 years ago

That $160 includes the royalty. It's the decision of each photographer whether to ask for one. If you don't like that, google for "royalty free stock photos", which is the much more popular way of licencing photos.

Even Getty has such a section: http://www.gettyimages.ch/creativeimages/royaltyfree

Of course, the really great looking photos often are not royalty free, which is why Getty features those on that page.

JimmyL5• 14 years ago

Welcome to the professional stock photo industry - that's what shots like that cost to use.

If you'd like something cheaper (which generally won't look as good, won't have the metadata searching capabilities you needs as a professional photo editor, or may not go with the story you're trying to illustrate), the market will provide - in the form of iStockPhoto and others.

Getty's main client base doesn't ever purchase just one photo, will rarely look at the price on the website (they know what they need, and already know roughly what it will cost), and more often than not will have their own separate pricing contract with Getty that looks nothing like that series of drop-down boxes.

If you're searching for an individual photo, looking at the price, and considering if you need it - you're just icing on the cake for Getty, as opposed to the target of their business model.

blhack2• 14 years ago

If you think that's expensive, go try to find a similar image on iStock.

jlarocco• 14 years ago

Okay, I don't get it. What's the joke?

Saying "$160? What a joke." puts you in the same category as the guys on rentacoder asking for $100 Photoshop clones.

taejo• 14 years ago

Seems like it would be easy to make a GIMP script to remove. I think the watermark needs more entropy/randomness to make it more difficult to separate the image from the watermark.

m_for_monkey2• 14 years ago

A QR code would have been a better choice to embed than the URL. Who wants (or able to) type correctly 10 digits?

mdda• 14 years ago

Yes - that has been the problem that's prevented the adoption of sequences of 10 numbers in the telephone system </sarcasm>

m_for_monkey2• 14 years ago

Telephone numbers are always use grouping (432-23-43), which makes copying easier. People still have problems with software license codes, although those are grouped too.

unfletch• 14 years ago

A QR code? What did you have in mind for interaction?

As far as I know you'd need at least two devices (the one whose screen is displaying the image with the QR code, and the one you're using to snap a photo of it). And then you'd probably want send the decoded URL back to the original device to load in the original browser.

Edit: Maybe you were thinking about the analog world, but watermarked images tend to show up in the digital space (in mockups especially).

tedunangst• 14 years ago

If visiting a URL involves taking my phone out of pocket, finding the QR app, taking a picture, emailing myself the URL, checking email on my desktop, and then clicking the link, I guarantee you that's not going to happen.

tferris• 14 years ago

Please help me understand: What is so special about a visible watermark which is gone anyway when I buy the image? Was it before that bad? Clueless.

pg2• 14 years ago

Are there also invisible watermarks on the images?

bmelton3• 14 years ago

I'm not sure if you're asking whether or not there's information encoded in the image's metadata, or whether they're using some sort of additional watermark that appears when the image is downloaded or copied, ala this article[1].

If you're asking about metadata, I can say that on the Getty images I've used in the past (not for years though, so it's old data,) they were pretty diligent about ensuring Authorship information in the metadata. I can't remember whether or not there were any specific Getty attributions in there, like a link back to a page it could be purchased from, but in other comments here I see that they have a 'creative ID', which I didn't know about, so it's possible I just glossed over it.

If you're asking about the second, I believe the answer is no, but I say so without having tried it, even cursorily.

http://blog.makezine.com/2009/02/16/invisible-watermark/

jmilloy• 14 years ago

I assumed he was asking about a third option - imperceptible digital watermarking.

ig1• 14 years ago

Getty used to use Digimarc's steganographic watermarking technology, but I don't know if they still do.

k33l0r• 14 years ago

Apparently not, just tried to unsuccessfully read the Digimarc watermark off a random Getty photo in Photoshop…

idspispopd2• 14 years ago

The files have metadata to help find the source.(Digimarc used to be implemented also.) The meta data is easily removed as is editing out the watermark.

However those aren't ever going to be paying customers anyway. When you license stock, you get more than just the high resolution file, but also 1. exclusivity if you've requested it and the necessary waivers to use the image in the way intended.

For example, a night time shot of the Eiffel Tower requires a waiver, as the light show is subject to copyright. (Believe it or not!) While a day shot won't require a waiver.

Not having a legitimate waiver is asking for a damages case by the owner, those depicted or other entity. This is covered in most countries via copyright & publicity laws.

JimmyL5• 14 years ago

I think this is great - it's either a win or no-worse-than-it-used-to-be, depending on the kind of Getty client you are.

If you're a designer at an agency (which would use watermarked photos in their comps, and then purchase proper rights once the client has approved) this is no worse than it used to be. You still have a watermarked image, it's just slicker looking. Having the URL in there is handy, but you would have recorded that anyways as part of your workflow. It's worth noting that the license behind these images still hasn't changed - you're only allowed to use them for 30 days, and not in a finished commercial product.

The other kind of client is the small-time blogger who would never pay for the image rights anyways, and would just use a watermarked comp shot in a post. According to the click-through license agreed to when downloading these images, this client type shouldn't exist - it's explicitly against what's permitted in the license - and yet it does, widely. For these clients, putting the URL in the image is a win for Getty; people who used these images will keep using them, but now those clients' viewers will be able to easily track the image back to its source, making it easy to actually purchase the image legally. This turns someone using a Getty image without permission from a problem (violating a license) to effectively free advertising.

The obvious next step - although I bet this would be difficult based on all the pre-existing contracts with the photographers - would be to accept that the second type of client exists, change the license on the comp shots, and try to bring them into the Getty fold. Change the license to say that you're allowed to use the images anywhere online you'd like for free, as long as the photo and watermark stays intact and your number of average monthly unique users is less than, say, 10,000. Doing this would take a sizable user base and turn them from license-violators into free advertising. Financially, this wouldn't affect 90% of the type-2 clients (they'd stay under the viewership cap), and would only impact the bottom line of mid-sized publications, who really should be paying for the rights anyways.

rdl2• 14 years ago

For type 2, what about allowing them to be embedded and linked from the gty.im server (which could enforce the 10k hits limit, do analytics/tracking, etc.), for free?

JimmyL5• 14 years ago

I like it - but I'd do both. No matter how nice the service gty.im would offer, there would be people out there who wouldn't want to link to the Getty servers, who would just choose to copy/paste anyways, or who would get stopped by the signup and clickthough requirements.

Maybe make gty.im a value-added free service - users could use the comp shots free for X users/month (where X is enough to cover only small/local sites), and then the next tier (X to 3X, say) would be hosted off gty.im, either for free or for a nominal fee. It'd provide analytics, a better-quality image, and would indirectly act as a sales funnel for moving up to a full Getty contract - and even if it didn't, it would start the relationship between Getty and small/independent publishers who have never thought about image rights.

tomflack• 14 years ago

I think that by having many users using the image for free - even with the restrictions, you are devaluing the ability to sell it to people who will actually pay. Who wants to use a stock image that is absolutely everywhere?

waffle_ss3• 14 years ago

All these comments about a silly watermark and not one mention of Getty Images's contemptible RIAA-like business tactics of shaking down people who use their photos illegally? The owner of my daughter's daycare had posted one of their images on a simple little website he built for us parents, and they sent him a letter demanding a few hundred dollars or were going to take him to court for thousands (he paid up). Apparently they must have some type of crawler that searches the Web for their images.

JimmyL5• 14 years ago

It obviously depends on the numbers involved, but from your brief description nothing sounds wrong. It's pretty hard to "accidentally" stumble onto a Getty image used without a copyright statement which could lead you to think it's free to use, and a few hundred bucks is about what Getty charges as the rack-rate for a small business using one of their images (as you can see from their website).

Maybe there are details I'm missing, but you don't mention any RIAA-like practices or gross inflation of the cost/damages.

waffle_ss3• 14 years ago

You might be right - I've never been in the situation - but he claimed to have taken it from some other site without any obvious copyright notice. Obviously not a smart move, and he did pay a price for it. The whole topic got brought up because I was planning on interviewing in one of their Rails shops and by doing research on the company I had stumbled across stories of people that had this exact thing happen to him, so I was shocked when he explained that it had happened to him as well.

I don't think the "fee" is unreasonable if a few hundred dollars is the going rate for licensing the image (although I personally would never pay that much), I just find the automated process of hunting these people down and asking for money right away (no option to just take it down immediately) a little distasteful, and in a similar vein to the RIAA's tactics.

blhack2• 14 years ago

...you might think that. Most people type terms into google images and don't realize that the images they find aren't free.

jasonlingx• 14 years ago

Yep they extort money by preying on the naive:

https://www.google.com/search?q=getty+images+extortion

bostonvaulter2• 14 years ago

Anyone have examples of their old watermarks?

idspispopd2• 14 years ago

I have never really understood why stock photo stores insist on aggressive watermarks. They don't help their business, rather the opposite. The number of people who can get by with a low resolution preview image are going to be private users who are never going to buy the image anyway. (Especially with sites like sxc.hu where you can just get high resolution photography for no cost.)

As someone who works with stock photos constantly, I can tell you that clients hate seeing watermarks, they're usually right in the way of the useful part of the image and are often distracting. As a result the art department photoshop them out which is painstaking and a waste of time for a low resolution image that is only going to be used once.

I'm pleased that this new watermark is very easy to undo/disguise. Getty seem to understand that stock-pirates are fine with using low-resolution, highly compressed preview images without a license, while their actual customers need images with watermarks that are unobtrusive and easier to sell to the paying-client.

The truth is that the image need only a very minor watermark, so the creative can track down the original. Creative agencies aren't stupid and are well versed in the laws that relate to stock images. They don't use random photos they find on the internet, and larger or risk-absolving clients will often require a copy of the license and waiver for the stock imagery.

johncoltrane• 14 years ago

Designers use these watermarked images when goofing around at the beginning of the creative process because they can't buy the dozens of image they need before actually knowing which one will be accepted by the client. Some images can be cheap, of course : royalty-free photos often are, compared to those with "exclusive rights", for example, but it would still take too much time and money. I know: I've spent countless hours looking for businessmen/women in Getty's and other databases. When you come up with 30 or 40 possible images and it's time to try them all in your comp it will be really hard to like this stupid square.

Such a temporary picture MUST be neutral because you need it to fit your composition/layout. This rectangle is the opposite of neutral: it's huge and very visible. This big square is going to clash more often than not with other shapes around the image which won't be aligned with it provoking all kinds of troubles for the designers who use them. Clients will think that the square is part of the designer's intent and, when it will be explained to them that no, this big ass square isn't part of the design they will rightfully say "Well, get rid of it!". But it won't be possible without paying large buckets of money to Getty.

Or using another service.

joeshaw• 14 years ago

These watermarks are a lot less annoying, but if I remember correctly the old watermarks were centered on the image, right? These new right-justified ones seem like they could be fairly easily abused. It took my about 30 seconds to find one like this:

http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/singer-and-song...

Pretty easy to crop out the right shot and have a perfectly fine, watermark-less photo.

On the other hand, like most DRMish solutions, I guess if you're dedicated enough to not paying for works like these, you will.

DigitalSea• 14 years ago

I think the new watermark is fantastic, it is definitely way better than their old watermark (a million times over). If you ever saw what the old watermark looked like, it ruined the images so much. Check out this image with the old watermark here: http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3bvopcnLC1qbi7o0o1_400.jp...

The watermark obscures vital detail in the image, kind of destroys the feeling of the original photo. So those of you who can only seem to muster up negative comments, go back to 4chan. The new watermark is innovative in an industry that feels like its been the same forever.

Getty's New Watermark

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