The most important thing to happen to Blogging this year?

Hi guys,
There are two things I look for when I'm reading a blog (and deciding to keep coming back again and again) Interesting content and great pictures. Now having the latter will be infinitely easier, thanks to Getty's announcement today that they are making the full spectrum of their images free to use for bloggers and other non commercial users. This is HUGE! In fact, I'm going to call it the most important thing to happen to blogging this year (Yes, I know it's only March)

All you have to do is visit the Getty website and find the image you want to use, then when you use the new Getty embed tool you can add that image to your site completely free. Because Getty is home to tens and millions of different images, this will be a complete game changer for bloggers: particularly celebrity and fashion bloggers that rely on instant access to relevant imagery to enhance their content! To prove the point, I've illustrated this post with a couple of images of some famous folks arriving on the red carpet for the Oscars on Sunday night.


As an additional note, I'm sure it takes hours to look that effortlessly beautiful, but Naomi Watts is my new beauty icon based solely on how incredible her make up looks in this picture! Embedded images will include photographer attribution and, when clicked, will link back to www.gettyimages.com where the image can be licensed for commercial use.(You can click it and see for yourself if you like!)

Of course, many blogs are using images that originated from Getty on their sites already: it's easy to find the image you're looking for on google, and simply modify it and add it to your site yourself. But such practices are not only illegal (although there is yet to be a case of an unpaid blogger being taken to court for doing so) they are also making it much harder for the average photographer to scratch a living, thanks to the onset of fast and accessible digital images. This new tool is at least an attempt to readdress that balance. To try the tool out for yourself, please visit www.gettyimages.com/embed That's what I did, and I couldn't believe how easy and quick it was to do! Like I said, it's a complete game changer! Will you be using Getty's free images on your blog?

Love Tor x