To entice frugal web designers to use Gettyimages.com, the Seattle-based stock photo company now offers licenses for very small images not previously offered on Getty, or even microstock sites such as iStockphoto, Fotolia and Shutterstock.

These micro-images, ideal for web and mobile products, come in two sizes: 170 or 280 pixels wide. Getty expects these types of photos to be used for e-mail, websites, web ads, banners, mobile apps and sites, intranets, web applications and other digital projects...

The founder and CEO of iStockphoto, Bruce Livingstone, has resigned just two years after his company merged with Getty Images.

Having served as the senior vice president of consumer markets for Getty since 2007, Livingstone wrote in a letter to the company that he is going to take time off to, spend time with [his] family‚ and figure out what to do next...

The same day that Getty Images announced that it had accepted a $2.4 billion buyout by private-equity firm Hellman & Friedman, shareholders filed a class-action lawsuit claiming that the stock agency had not looked after their interests and had accepted an undervalued bid.

The long-rumored deal, worth $34 per share, was confirmed on Feb. 25 and is expected to close in the second or third quarter of this year. The merger has been approved by Getty's board of directors, it was still subject to shareholder approval at press time.

Securities and Exchange Commission filings for the transaction indicate that Getty had left room for better offers. Bids well over $40 per share had been tendered by other parties, but in settling with Hellman & Friedman, Getty had to take into account...

Citing a recent decline in core business and poor second-quarter earnings, Getty Images announced the elimination of 100 jobs. This follows an earlier round of layoffs Getty ordered after it acquired MediaVast, which owns the stock agency WireImage.

Second-quarter declines for Getty were most obvious in its licensing sector, where volumes were down 11 percent in royalty-free imagery and 6 percent for rights-managed imagery, compared with the same period last year. A glitch in Getty's online footage...

Due to the recent uproar from several photography groups, Getty Images has announced a small concession regarding its recent posting of a $49 price for stock images on their web site. Getty's executive vice president for imagery issued a statement explaining the company's decision to reduce the duration of rights-ready and rights-managed web-resolution licenses from a year down to three months.

Originally, the company introduced a pricing plan that was a breakthrough in the industry, pricing almost any online photograph from Getty at $49. The pricing plan included creative, news, sports, entertainment or archival images for online usage of a 500-kilobyte file at 72 dpi. The Image Source and Arnold Newman collections were...

In April, Getty Images acquired Pixel Images Holdings Limited, the Irish parent company of Stockbyte and Stockdisc, for $135 million. Most of the content licensed under the Stockbyte and Stockdisc brands through a worldwide network of distributors is already available on www.gettyimages.com, with the remainder to be added by midyear.

Despite an aggressive acquisition strategy over the past 18 months, its holdings now include Photonica, Digital Vision, Medio Images and iStockphoto, the company recently lost standing...