I don't think I'm excited about the launch of life.com  The images I supply to Getty (through the iStock/Getty agreement) are all there. Yes, you can click on the "licence this image" button which takes you off to the Getty site to buy a licence. But the one click to share, email and blog with my images for free doesn't thrill me at all. Specifying that the free use is for personal use only doesn't cut much ice with me, as the Vincent Laforet article mentions, many bloggers earn money on their blogs and that to me makes them commercial. 

Life.com is making a song and dance about bringing free images to the masses. It seems to be their marketing drive.  I think that ethos is devaluing my work at Getty, and I'm going to have a long think about whether I continue to add images there 

Yeah, I found my images on Life.com. I'm not sure how I feel about this or what the purpose is.

I would imagine it's going to be mainly consumers using this and I don't know if they're going to be licensing images. I don't think the common consumer has a clue about acceptable use for these images so there's little to no control about what gets done with them. At least on Getty there's a warning about usage, fines, etc and I think most people associate Getty with buying expensive images. Is a blogger or Facebook person who links or shares a Life image really a prospect for licensing it?

Maybe I'm missing something but I'm not seeing the benefit or how this ties into generating revenue for images on Getty.

But it doesn�t look like they are sharing the images. They only allow links to be sent or added to a blog. Not the pictures themselves.

I haven't tested the links but I just thought of a couple of things.

I wonder if this is another land-grab like Getty did with Flickr. To make more money you can either attract more buyers or reduce competition so buyers have less options. Somebody had to supply images to Life.com. Was this a move to further stifle competitors like Corbis and boost Getty's exposure through social media?