Daniel Wolf pulled off what may have been the greatest legal art caper of all time: Over the course of two years in the early 1980s, he quietly amassed some 25,000 classic and contemporary photographs, buying them from the world’s most renowned collectors on behalf of his client the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
He was so secretive that none of the sellers knew about the others, or about their buyer — a stealthiness that allowed him, and the Getty, to pay about $17 million, “less than the price of a moderately good Cezanne still life,” said John Walsh, the director of the Getty at the time, in an interview with The Los Angeles Times.
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But nothing made quite as big a splash as the Getty acquisition. It not only gave an institutional imprimatur to collecting photography; it also soaked up a sizable chunk of supply, making the remaining works on the market much more valuable.
“Suddenly, absolutely overnight, 25,000 of the rarest photographs ever taken were off the market,” said Weston Naef, who helped Mr. Wolf plan the acquisition for the Getty and later became its first curator of photography. “It would be like someone removing half the gold from Fort Knox.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/arts/daniel-wolf-dead.htm...
https://www.getty.edu/research/library/faq.html#gettyimages
> No, Getty Images has no relationship to the J. Paul Getty Trust.
The "Getty" name derived from the same person, but the museum and Getty Images have nothing do with each other.
Some of the initial investments in Getty Images came from other members of the Getty family (who had inherited probably quite a lot of money from J. Paul) but that seems to be the extent of the relationship.
Offline personal archives and tools to create them I expect are permissible (IANAL)
Creating a mirror is forbidden by Unsplash's license.
I wonder if there are any actually CC0/Public Domain image sites left anymore?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Claiming_copyrigh...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_Images#Acquisitions