[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?