[js2]

Recently, I wanted to make some picture postcards of various locations around the US for personal use, so I went looking for images. I found many on Flickr. I wanted to compensate the original photographer. There is no easy way to do this.

At best, some photographs have a "request to license" link that bounces you to a third party (typically Getty Images) which offers to "Review the photo to determine if it's a good fit for licensing through us; Contact the photographer; Handle the details like releases and pricing" and takes "between two and seven days to arrange licensing." with prices typically around $100 for usable resolution for a postcard.

At worst, you have to sign in to Yahoo so that you can send the photographer a message about wanting to use their photo. You may or may not get a reply, and you have to arrange how to pay the photographer, if at all.

This may make sense for images which are to be used in a commercial context, but for personal use like how I wanted to use the images, it's way too expensive and much too much friction.

The vast majority of images will never be used commercially. There should be an easier way to remunerate the photographer, and at more reasonable prices. A "Pix Store" if you will. Maybe that's what the stock photo sites are supposed to be, but they don't have nearly the inventory.

Sorry for the tangent.

[Terretta]

"This may make sense for images which are to be used in a commercial context, but for personal use like how I wanted to use the images, it's way too expensive and much too much friction."

That's why Flickr lets you search for Creative Commons images, for which the photographer gives you that personal use permission in advance.

[chives]

Never mind various sites which also offer public domain images as well. Then there is the 3rd choice of actually talking to the photographer. I have used original songs produced from a musician (with his written consent) and photos produced by a photographer (again with written consent) on websites I have made. Then again one is a good friend and the other is the future wife of another good friend of mine.

[js2]

There are shades of a grey between commercial use and free use which are unaddressed.

[Terretta]

You think so? I license photos through Creative Commons, and differently depending on the shades of personal to commercial I consider inherent in the potential market for a photo.

I find it covers all the shades of commerciality I've considered. Meanwhile, for a purely commercial photographer, the getty images option is there, and those won't come up in the Creative Commons search unless licensed appropriately.

The CC search tool on Flickr is a fantastic tool for finding photos of the exact "shade" of use you're looking for.

[js2]

CC photos are all free for non-commercial use, correct? What if you'd like to be compensated, but not at rates that justify the overhead of Getty Images? Many of the images I found were not CC licensed, nor did they have a Getty Images option. Those are the images I'm referring to.

e.g., go search Flickr for "drawdy falls". No results in Getty, no results in the Commons, but a handful of images from photographers that are retaining full copyright, but have't posted contact info. Maybe they don't want compensation and just failed to select CC when they posted. Who knows. Regardless, many of the images I found were in this middle ground. I'm not trying to sound entitled here, just pointing out that there's lots of images that sadly cannot be used.

[briandon]

The Getty Images process doesn't sound too terrible to me.

Is the up-to-a-week wait partly a consequence of GI giving the photog a chance to approve/deny the request? That would be reasonable -- they might not want, for example, a Neo-Nazi group licensing their photo of blonde, blue-eyed kids for some sort of racist poster campaign.

Also, $100 licensing for a photo that you really love is cheap as chips.

By personal use, do you mean that you were literally going to produce one copy of each postcard and keep them all yourself? You weren't going to make multiple copies and give/send any to anyone else?

[js2]

I was making a single postcard per image, and needed a total of 30 separate images. These were going to a family member (30 postcards from 30 locations for her 30th birthday).

Having to wait a week for each image, and pay $100 each, wasn't going to work.

For personal use such as this it'd be nice if there were an easier way. Maybe Flickr could even be the middle man and take a 30% cut.

[cbr]

You can make the requests in parallel; it's one week total, not "a week for each image".

[jtheory]

It's probably a bigger problem that it was going to cost him $3000 to send those 30 postcards (postage not included).

Getty is clearly defaulting to "I want to use this image in an advertisement" or similar uses, NOT a one-off single print of an image, to be "displayed" to a single person audience. $100 per image is ridiculous for that.

[pbhjpbhj]

The requests are serial, the delay is parallelised. Or is there really a multi-request system?

[andylei]

> There should be an easier way to remunerate the photographer, and at more reasonable prices

does anybody know of a site that allows this?

[anothermachine]

Just print the pictures and send the photog a tip via Paypal or buy something (anything) the photog is selling.

[elithrar]

> Just print the pictures and send the photog a tip via Paypal or buy something (anything) the photog is selling.

Just because the photographer has one image for sale, it does not mean he is selling (or giving you the rights to distribute/copy) another image.

[_delirium]

Yeah, in general stuff like Getty Images is intended to license redistribution of the photo: if you plan to sell or give away hundreds of post cards, or use the photo on your website, or something else. It's pretty uncommon to license photos that you just want to print out at home for private use. To me that's more akin to saving a photo and making it your desktop wallpaper.