Can you use the free Getty images in your PowerPoint presentations?
Getty Images, has announced that 35 million of their images are now available free. Does that mean you can use them in your PowerPoint presentations or Word documents?
Sadly, no
Getty Images is now allowing free embedding to some images in their vast collection. That means you can only use the images on web sites and even then only using their special ‘Embedded Viewer’.
The exact terms of the ‘free’ use are:
Embedded Getty Images Content may not be used: (a) for any commercial purpose (for example, in advertising, promotions or merchandising) or to suggest endorsement or sponsorship; (b) in violation of any stated restriction; (c) in a defamatory, pornographic or otherwise unlawful manner; or (d) outside of the context of the Embedded Viewer.
Point (d) effectively excludes use in Word or PowerPoint.
Aaaah, I here you say, but I can link to a web image from inside a Word document. Yes you can, but the Getty Images embedding links aren’t standard links. They are IFRAME links that start their Embedded Viewer in a window within a web page.
Here’s an example of the embedded viewer at work (between the horizontal lines):
And here’s the code that created the above image.
At the time of writing (March 2014), the embedding code includes a lot more than just the image and a discreet caption/credit. All that extra text will make this new embedding option very unappealing to most users. Because it’s an embedded link the exact formatting of the image and surrounding text can (and probably will) change over time.
To link to a Getty Image find the image you want from their web site – starting from this search page will show only images available for free embedding.
When you find an image, click on the embed link below the image preview then copy the embed HTML code to use on your web site.
Details at http://www.gettyimages.com/Creative/Frontdoor/embed
Many people do grab images and use them on their web sites even though it’s illegal and you can get a nasty legal letter from the owner. This new arrangement from Getty Images is really saying ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”.
