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Select Flickr photos to sell via Getty license

Yahoo's photo-sharing service offers a way for selected members to offer up their shots as microstock photography on Getty Images. They'll just have to wait to be contacted.

Josh Lowensohn Former Senior Writer
Josh Lowensohn joined CNET in 2006 and now covers Apple. Before that, Josh wrote about everything from new Web start-ups, to remote-controlled robots that watch your house. Prior to joining CNET, Josh covered breaking video game news, as well as reviewing game software. His current console favorite is the Xbox 360.
Josh Lowensohn
2 min read

Flickr on Tuesday entered a partnership with Getty Images to offer its users a way to potentially make money off their photography.

The Yahoo-owned photo-hosting community will be a new resource for Getty, which can now contact Flickr members directly through the site and ask them if they want to share one or more of their images for use in a special Flickr-branded Getty collection.

Flickr members interested in getting their images featured in the special Getty gallery will have to simply wait to be contacted. Otherwise, Getty and Flickr are encouraging aspiring photographers to post their content on the Getty-owned iStockphoto, which also happens to have been a hotbed for Flickr photos in the past.

Flickr-hosted images that have been chosen to be included in the new collection will get a special link to the Getty page where they can purchase a license to use the shot.

In order to get paid and allow their images to be used, Flickr members must sign a Getty Images contributor contract, which stipulates that the photographer is the owner, and has any necessary model releases and originals. It also outlines the various rates based on size and intended commercial usage.

Those rates, not yet available, are likely to follow some of Getty's standard rates. As part of the deal, the only transaction is being shared directly between the photographer and Getty, meaning Yahoo will not be getting a share of that fee. According to Yahoo's rep, "Getty and Flickr have a separate business relationship."

The move is a special deal for Flickr, which currently does not allow for commercial transactions on the site outside of using partners for services such as photo printing. It's long been expected that Flickr would get around to implementing a system like this, if only to take advantage of the size of its collection, which averages thousands of user uploads every minute.

Update: Changes have been made to this article since it first posted regarding the link to the Getty purchase pages on Flickr as well as the nature of the business partnership between Getty Images and Yahoo.