The J. Paul Getty Museum has honored Weston Naef, the outgoing senior curator of photographs, with the title of Curator Emeritus, following his retirement from the museum in January 2009.

Naef came to the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1984 from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in conjunction with...

Stock photographers Roger Ressmeyer and Richard Minden are leading a $100 million class-action lawsuit against Getty Images over its Premium Access subscription plan. The Premium Access service is an unadvertised product that Getty offers its high-volume costumers.

Joining Ressmeyer and Minden are 84 other photographers, who claim that Getty has violated copyrights and contracts by including rights-managed images in the Premium Access product...

Google and Time Inc. have teamed up to bring more than 10 million images from Life magazine to users around the world. The free image portal contains collections from Life's Photo Archive, including some of the most iconic works of the 20th century by photojournalists such as Margaret Bourke-White, Gordon Parks and W. Eugene Smith.

Already, millions of Life images are available for viewing via Google Image Search. Once the online project is complete in the next few months, the archive will be among the largest professional photography collections on the web and one of the largest photo-scanning projects ever undertaken...

Getty Images and Jupiterimages are set to merge their services as part of a $96 million deal. At press time, the merger was scheduled to occur in early 2009.

As early as March 2007, Getty showed interest in acquiring Jupiterimages. A tentative deal valued at $388 million never materialized. Jupitermedia, the parent company of Jupiterimages, also received interest from four other buyers in 2008...

Amid layoffs, reorganizations and market imbalance, a number of photo stock agencies have decided to trim the royalty rates they pay for rights-managed images.

The changes began in September 2008, when Alamy announced that it would reduce its royalty rates from 65 percent to 60 percent. A few weeks later, during the 2008 PhotoPlus Expo, Corbis senior vice president Don Wieshlow said Corbis would lower its rates from a range of 45 to 50 percent to 40 percent as contracts come up for renewal...

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...

The Securities and Exchange Commission has initiated an inquiry into Getty Images' stock option grants. In a statement released toward the end of last year, the company said that the commission had requested information and that Getty was cooperating, including establishing a committee to conduct an internal investigation with the assistance of outside attorneys.

In late November 2006, Getty announced its decision to delay the filing of its report for the third quarter of 2006 until the resolution of the inquiry into its stock option grant practices.

On Jan. 5, 2007, the company released a statement saying that it did not consider itself...

As part of the 10th anniversary of the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum has acquired images by Felice Beato, Tim Hawkinson and Irving Penn.

Beato was one of the first photographers to chronicle war and social upheaval. His images document many different conflicts, ranging from the Crimea and India to China and Korea, where, in 1871, he made the first known photographs of Korean people. The Beato collection acquired by the Getty includes more than...

Market rumors were ignited in January, claiming that Seattle-based Getty Images, the world's leading distributor of visual content, had put itself on the market, with offers pending, mostly from private-equity firms, that could total $1.6 billion.

The New York Times first broke the story Jan. 21 with information from "people briefed on the situation" and listed Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Bain Capital as interested parties.

Getty Images responded with a release stating that its policy is to neither confirm nor deny market rumors, but it did announce that it is "exploring strategic alternatives to enhance shareholder value." The release also stated...

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...