Getty's New Mobile App is a Free Portal Into Millions of Shareable Photos After allowing users to embed its roughly 100 million stock images, Getty has no launched its first-ever mobile app, Stream, for Apple devices operating iOS 8.
By Geoff Weiss
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Six months after unlocking its vast trove of images with a groundbreaking embed feature, Getty is hoping to make its roughly 100 million stock photos even more accessible to consumers with a brand new mobile app entitled Stream.
Users can now browse curated Getty archives from their mobile devices and share images instantly via Facebook or Twitter. Images can also be pasted via an embed code onto websites or blogs. The free app -- which is also Getty's first -- is only available for iPhone and iPad devices operating iOS 8.
Getty still specifies that its images be relegated to "non-commercial use," meaning that they can't be used "to sell a product, raise money, or promote or endorse something," according to its terms of service. However, this creates a slippery slope, it has been noted, when one's personal brand or blog becomes their business.
Related: The 8 Secret Places to Find the Best Stock Images
Roughly 600,000 embedded Getty images are now active, reports Businessweek, which, all told, have resulted in 800 million page views on the web. Today, Getty counts roughly 1.3 million customers.
And while users no longer have to pay to share Getty images, its growing reach means that the agency could eventually include advertising within the embeds -- much in the same way that ads run alongside embedded YouTube videos. The company is also able to collect data about image viewership through the embeds.
In addition to browsing photo streams arranged by various categories -- including news, sports and entertainment -- users can also stream slideshows via AirPlay on their Apple TVs.
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