Running amok

October 11, 2007 by pmelcher.

One has to wonder what is going in the minds of the Getty management. A quick stroll throught their website today reveals some strange discoveries. Follow me for a little tour, I will show you:

Free images for website usage ?: If you go to the entertainemnet images pages and click on any thumbnail, you will get a preview with absolutely no watermarks. Funny part is that this only works with celebrity images, not with sports or news, and only for Getty Images staffers. Go ahead. I will wait for you here…You back ? Has Getty decided to offer free celebrity images to bloggers and fans ? or have they decided to increase their revenues by letting people steal their images and sue them ?

First view: Not quite sure what this is all about but after doing a search in the same entertainment images section, one can see a “FirstLook images only” tab on the top left. if you click on it, nothing really happens besides a message saying that there are no images available for this search. It also refers you to  two options, All Creative images (2213079 images found) or All Editorial images (10789174 images found). If you ever wondered how many images Getty has on line you can now do so by adding these two numbers. At least that was helpful…Go ahead, try it.

Learn German: If you go on the home page of Getty’s editorial section, on the left again, there is a nice picture of Johnny Cash with the words “Inside the Archive. Find out more”. Click on it and you are directed to Getty’s German home page, probably meaning that you will only learn more if you read proper German. Did you see it ? Now, wasn’t that special ?

After spending more than $35 million on their digital delivery platform,  Getty Image seems to have lost its direction with their newly launched websites. This is a good example of what happens when you keep adding more and more features, bells and whistles . There is something to be said about simplicity.

Posted in Search, No sense, filter, editorial, getty | Print | No Comments »