I'm surprised to find myself defending Getty Images at all, but here I am. Before I dealt with huge collections as a developer, I didn't consider how much intellectual work went into managing collections as entities-- Things like ontology, or even maintaining consistent terminology usage in that much metadata is not trivial, and older materials cause the most problems. Even if these were exclusively public domain images, it would still be a praiseworthy effort. I'm sure some Getty archivist or the like fought hard for this.

This isn't a Getty Images initiative, but rather being run by the Getty Museum which is under the Getty Trust. My partner actually works on some of these systems at the Getty and you're right, it's daunting. The sad part is that the Getty gets to do these kinds of things only because it's one of the best endowed institutions on the planet with funding to pay researchers/archivists/developers to do this work. There is so much more that is locked away at large, medium, and small institutions that would be available for the public, but just isn't because of lack of funding.

> This isn't a Getty Images initiative, but rather being run by the Getty Museum

ADHD fail on my part! I even skimmed the article and totally didn't even parse that basic bit of context. Considering that Getty Images (originally photodisc) didn't appear until the early 90s, I'd love to see this turn into a Worldwide Wildlife Federation/Wordwide Wrestling Federation thing.

It being a museum makes it a lot more compelling though. Great job Getty!

>The sad part is that the Getty gets to do these kinds of things only because it's one of the best endowed institutions on the planet with funding to pay researchers/archivists/developers to do this work

And even within those institutions there's still more work than could feasibly be done. I worked in one of the best-funded, if not the best-funded non-governmental library systems on the planet and they've got an order of magnitude more things that need to be digitized than what they've already done, and they do a LOT already.

It’s 88k images… I think you are massively overestimating the complexity

Which necessary steps and how much time would you estimate per image?

They probably think they can code something in 5 minutes

"Before I dealt with huge collections as a developer" says the comment I responded to. 88k is not a huge collection of anything from a software development perspective.

The compilation of that collection is obviously more considerable. Archivists at Getty have already said it is about 10 years work for ~20 people.

I guess that depends on what you consider "development" to be?

Yeah, I suppose thats a fair point.

> I didn't consider how much intellectual work went into managing collections as entities

I wasn't talking about the software development side, and I certainly wouldn't call the tech end of this a significant part of the 'intellectual work.' Organizing and managing 88k images is something my laptop 10 years ago wouldn't balk at, serving them is something a low-tier vps could do, and supporting CRUD apps for the archivists, etc are usually trivial. I think you're massively underestimating the importance of other people's tasks in these operations. Even as a developer, the people-focused work-- e.g. working with the other teams to strategize about how tech could best suit their processes, training, design iterations, etc.-- was more work than any technical component.

You're thinking about this from a technical perspective. The content, and therefore structure and logical chunking of the metadata is far more consequential than the number of images. I've seen people in academic environments pour tens of thousands of post-doc-hours into cataloging a few thousand images:

https://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/

The J. Paul Getty Museum, not to be confused with Getty Images. (I made the same mistake reading the headline.) Don't worry, you can continue to hate on Getty Images at your leisure.

Haha... d'oh! That's a fail.