In a world where most photography has so little value, the demise of Getty Images is no surprise

Freelance stock photographers have for years complained that they are being ripped off by the big stock agencies, most notably Getty Images, who take as much as 85% commission on photo sales, leaving the photographer with just a few cents in some cases, when you factor in the very low rates that a lot of stock photography is selling for.

Getty Images has been cast as something of a super-villain, making huge profits on the backs of their creators, with other agencies like Alamy also coming under fire recently for reducing their own previously more generous rates.

So the news that Getty Images has filed for bankruptcy, with debts of around $2.1 billion, will come as a shock to many. The news comes in the wake of the failure of the proposed merger with rival Shutterstock, which was blocked by the UK Competition and Markets Authority.

Personally, I’m not that surprised. As a photographer I used to be a contributor to one of the picture libraries that Getty swallowed up, in the days when stock was sold from printed catalogues. Now, as a publisher, I’m a buyer of photos. When I started at Amateur Photographer in the early 1990s, if you needed a photo of, say, a dog, and there was nothing suitable in the catalogue, you’d phone them up and they’d send a bike courier round to the office with a bag full of transparencies. Those were the peak days of the stock business when even a modest, fractional page usage for a single photo would generate a three figure bill. Today stock photos can be downloaded in seconds for less than the price of a coffee. Getty Images currently have over 3.6 million photos of dogs on its website and most big customers have all-you-can-eat subscriptions that brings the cost per image right down.

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