Author Topic: Google image search redesigned - hi res stock photos (Read 23892 times)

John W. · « **Reply #50 on:** February 01, 2013, 13:13 »

^^ agree. You can do a reverse search for year(s) already with the largest file first.

ArenaCreative · « **Reply #51 on:** February 01, 2013, 13:48 »

Quote from: cthoman on February 01, 2013, 13:05

Quote from: jsnover on February 01, 2013, 12:35
What a depressing theme - once companies become successful and dominant they ignore, or abuse, the people who create the content that made them big and successful.

I honestly don't really see what the big outrage is here. You could sort your search results by size before. This change really isn't all that different. Google isn't the one that is putting these large resolution files out there. Will there be abuses? Yes, of course. Does Google drive sales and bring paying customers in as well? Yes, they do.

I'm of the opinion that the positives outweigh the negatives here. And, the negatives are things that Google can't fix like sites posting images at resolutions they aren't supposed to or people stealing files from sites. Those two things will probably exist as long as the internet does.

Exactly. You have to expect this sort of thing, it's a control issue. If you want full 100% control, you are probably in the wrong sector of the business. You'd be better off selling only rights managed and treat every image your product like one of your children. No it's not pleasing when people use purchased images in a way that goes against the terms of use, but it's not within anyone's control to be able to police 100% of the violations.

Poncke · « **Reply #52 on:** February 01, 2013, 13:54 »

No, the difference is that Google is now showing the full res on THEIR search engine. You no longer have to go the website. Its taking traffic away from sites. And traffic is the life line of a website. Google is messing with peoples livelihoods once more.

Travelling-light · « **Reply #53 on:** February 01, 2013, 14:33 »

Quote from: Poncke on February 01, 2013, 13:54

No, the difference is that Google is now showing the full res on THEIR search engine. You no longer have to go the website. Its taking traffic away from sites. And traffic is the life line of a website. Google is messing with peoples livelihoods once more.

The only people who will suffer are the ones who build websites where they give away images to attract views to ads. Sounds like a good deal for us, as if those sites go out of business we will have less free competition.

If Google have a business end in view in these changes, it may be to hurt companies which sell advertising on a pay-per-view basis.

CommuniCat · « **Reply #54 on:** February 01, 2013, 15:14 »

Can't help thinking that with all the problems with Getty/iStock/Google it's time to start looking at RM again. The "stack em high, sell em cheap" strategy only works if there is a method (agencies) in place to collect pennies and pay out the dollars.

If that business model is destroyed by a Google ultra efficient at finding large stock images without watermarks, or a greedy bunch of corporate socipaths like Getty, then surely the only option is to reverse the flow again with RM by limiting the distribution by price? Less images out there means less opportuinty for theft. RM images - or a similar licensing model, must be a lot easier to protect.

Stock imagery won't go away - if value from RF is degraded the licensing model will just change it's form again.

viorel_dudau · « **Reply #55 on:** February 04, 2013, 06:04 »

So, now that D-Day madness is almost over, I can see there are more than 100 pages only on this forum about Getty/Google Drive situation. That's a lot!

While here on this topic we have only 3 pages of messages.

Which makes me wonder: Do you really understand the problem?

Google Drive has about 10k pageviews per day. Do you know how many page views per day Google Images has? 1 BILLION! Yes, 1 billion pageviews a day, for over 10 billion images indexed.

Can you even calculate how small the Getty/Google Drive situation is, compared with the real issue?

Here's an article published today by Achilles, on his blog: http://blog.dreamstime.com/2013/02/04/google-images-new-layout-how-this-impacts-photographers-and-webmasters_art38649

Any input is highly appreciated.

We need to think of a better strategy to protect our images and educate people, if we want to be here next year.

Microbius · « **Reply #56 on:** February 04, 2013, 06:25 »

If Google decided to act in a moral way and stopped trying to shirk its responsibility and hide behind safe harbor provisions this could actually be good for the industry.

Their search is getting so good that it can find all instances of an image out there on the internet in one search. Imagine if they then allowed the owner of the images to tag all instances with their copyright info. So when any one of the images came up in a search the copyright holder's info would be right there allowing the searcher to track ownership and buy a licence.

If they actually cared about people looking into the copyright status of an image before pinching it from one of their searches they would already be working on this. Surely it would be the best thing for many of their users who are looking for an image to use too.

Reef · « **Reply #57 on:** February 04, 2013, 07:09 »

Quote from: viorel_dudau on February 04, 2013, 06:04

Which makes me wonder: Do you really understand the problem?

Yeah, sure, Getty, and its partner in crime, Google, are killing Microstock. Feb 2nd is over, now we wait and see if the big guns in MS will sue. Personally, I'm now focusing outside the reaches of Getty and Google.