Getty Images starts new experiment, Photos.com

Once you've nurtured an established premium stock image site and an ecosystem around it, what can Getty Images do next? Try something that the run-of-the-mill online photography store can't offer (yet), of course: offer to print the image as wall art on a new site called Photos.com.

Source: Photos.com website

The stock image engine can easily be adapted to offer prints for sale, and existing Getty Images editors can draw on existing image collections to build up the collection for the new Photos.com the same way they do for other Getty Images collections. The permissions and legal agreements have already been drawn up after all, and other than being aesthetically suitable for wall art, images in the Photos.com collection only need to have a resolution high enough to look good when printed at the largest size offered on the new site.

As befits a site owned by a stock image company, there are already plenty of high quality pictures to choose from, in monochrome and in colour, in a wide variety of categories. "Every photograph at Photos.com has been hand-selected for its power to tell a story. Our editors comb through every image and curate galleries to help you find what you’re looking for. From ethereal black and whites to portraits of world-famous personalities, from lush botanicals to sea vistas and cityscapes, we have hundreds of thousands of images and are adding more every day," states the website. 

Basically, any picture chosen on Photos.com can be printed on paper, canvas, acrylic 'glass', aluminium, even birchwood, then framed in a size suitable for display as wall art, or left unframed as you wish. 

Prices vary depending on the size of the print chosen, and the materials chosen. A small full colour canvas print of 30 x 45 cm is the cheapest at US$99*, while the XL sized acrylic print, measuring 81 x 121 cm, is the most expensive at US$374*.

*All prices exclude shipping and taxes.