History

First stock photo companies (1920–1930s)edit

Newspapers and magazines were first able to reproduce photographs instead of line art in the mid-1880s with the invention of the half-tone and its use on a printing press. Initially starting with staff photographers, independent free-lance photographers eventually took over. One of the first examples of a stock photo was circa 1920 when American photographer H. Armstrong Roberts ensured that the people photographed in "Group in Front of Tri-Motor Airplane" all signed model releases. This allowed the photograph and others like it to be commercially viable. In an effort to save the cost of hiring photographers for commission-based photo shoots, publishers and advertisers began to consider stock photos as a less risky alternative. One of the first major stock photography libraries was founded in 1920 by H. Armstrong Roberts.

The Bettmann Archive in New York is an example of an early traditional stock agency, with the company delivering photos upon 24-hour request to magazines such as Look and Life. Founded in 1936 by Otto Bettmann, a German curator who emigrated to the United States in 1935, the Bettman Archive began with Bettmann's personal collection of 15,000 images which he brought with him in suitcases when he escaped from Nazi Germany. He actively expanded his collection by placing ads in magazines for stills and photos. A different early pioneer with the stock industry was photographer Tony Stone, whose portfolio of mountain scenes proved popular with chocolate advertisers. Stone's stock library eventually reached 20,000 images, each selected for its likelihood to sell multiple copies.

New indexing systems and growth (1940s–1980s)edit

Known as a stock resource for newspapers and magazines, the Hulton Archive started as the photographic archive of Picture Post. As the archive expanded through World War II, it became clear that its vast collection of photographs and negatives were becoming an important historical documentary resource. In 1945, Sir Edward Hulton set up the Hulton Press Library as a semi-independent operation and commissioned Charles Gibbs-Smith of the Victoria and Albert Museum to catalogue the entire archive using a system of keywords and classifications. The Gibbs-Smith system claims to be the world’s first indexing system for pictures, and it was eventually adopted by the British Museum collections.

Expansion and transition online (1980s–1990s)edit

By the 1980s, stock photography had become a specialty in its own right, with the stock industry advancing quickly. As photo libraries transitioned from physical archives to servers in the mid-1990s, "stock libraries" were increasingly called "stock agencies." The archives also began to rely increasingly on keywords for sorting and retrieving photographs. In 1991 Photodisc in Seattle, Washington began selling CD ROMs with packs of images. Unlike their competitors, Photodisc licensed the image packs as Royalty Free. In contrast to the Rights Managed system, royalty free allowed the purchaser of a CD ROM to use the images as many times as they liked without paying further fees.

There was a great amount of consolidation among stock photo agencies between 1990 and the mid-2000s, with Corbis notably acquiring the massive Bettmann Archive in 1995. After Photodisc went online in 1995, in September 1997, PhotoDisc agreed to combine with London-based Getty Communications to form the Seattle-based Getty Images. In 1996, the Hulton Picture Collection was bought by Getty Images for £8.6 million.

Alamy (registered as Alamy Limited) is a privately owned stock photography agency launched in 1999. Alamy maintains an online archive of over one hundred million still images, illustrations and hundreds of thousands of videos contributed by agencies and independent photographers or collected from news archives, museums and national collections. Its suppliers include both professional and amateur photographers, stock agencies, news archives, museums and national collections. Its clients are from the photography, publishing and advertising industries and the general public.

Recent developments (2000–present)edit

The early microstock company iStockphoto was founded in May 2000. Originally a free stock imagery website, it transitioned into its current micropayment model in 2001. iStockphoto co-founders Bruce Livingstone and Brianna Wettlaufer then went on to start Stocksy United in 2013. Helping pioneer the subscription-based model of stock photography, Shutterstock was founded in 2003 with a monthly subscription fee. Online since 2000 as a royalty free stock photography website, in 2004 Dreamstime was founded as new microstock agency. Other stock agencies with new business models around this time included fotoLibra, which opened to the public in 2005, and Can Stock Photo, which debuted in 2004. By 2007 Dreamstime was competing with iStockphoto, Fotolia and Shutterstock, all expanded into major microstock companies. In March 2013 microstock company Depositphotos launched Clashot, a service that allows smartphone users to instantly upload photos to the photobank from their devices, followed by Fotolia, that launched the very similar Fotolia Instant later that year.

Between the 1990s and the mid-2000s, Bill Gates' Corbis Images and Getty Images combined purchased more than 40 stock photo agencies. iStockphoto, or iStock.com, was acquired by Getty in 2006. In February 2009, Jupitermedia Corporation sold their online stock images division, Jupiterimages, to Getty Images for $96 million in cash, including the sites stock.xchng and StockXpert. In 2005, Scoopt started a photo news agency for citizen journalism enabling the public to upload and sell breaking news images taken with cameraphones. In 2007 Scoopt was purchased by Getty Images, which closed it in 2009. In 2012 Shutterstock became the first microstock agency to complete an initial public offering, with the company's shares reaching a $2.5 billion market value by late 2013. The stock photo company Fotolia announced that it would be acquired by Adobe for $800 million on December 11, 2014.