Retrofile

Last updated
Retrofile
IndustryStock Photography
Founded1920;103 years ago (1920)
Founder H. Armstrong Roberts
Defunct2005 (2005)
FateAcquired by Getty Images

Retrofile is one of the first major stock photography agencies. It was founded in 1920 by H. Armstrong Roberts. In late 2005, Getty Images acquired the Retrofile brand name and trademark. Some of Armstrong's collection not acquired by Getty will be available at Classic Stock.


Related Research Articles

Getty Images Holdings, Inc. is an American-British visual media company and is a supplier of stock images, editorial photography, video and music for business and consumers, with a library of over 477 million assets. It targets three markets—creative professionals, the media, and corporate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Branded Entertainment Network</span> American licensing company

BENlabs, formerly BEN Group Inc, is a Los Angeles-based product placement, influencer marketing and licensing company. The company offers AI-driven product placement, influencer marketing services, music partnerships, rights clearance, and personality rights management services for the entertainment industry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stock photography</span> Photographs with a specific use

Stock photography is the supply of photographs which are often licensed for specific uses. The stock photo industry, which began to gain hold in the 1920s, has established models including traditional macrostock photography, midstock photography, and microstock photography. Conventional stock agencies charge from several hundred to several thousand US dollars per image, while microstock photography may sell for around US$25 cents. Professional stock photographers traditionally place their images with one or more stock agencies on a contractual basis, while stock agencies may accept the high-quality photos of amateur photographers through online submission.

Stock footage, and similarly, archive footage, library pictures, and file footage is film or video footage that can be used again in other films. Stock footage is beneficial to filmmakers as it saves shooting new material. A single piece of stock footage is called a "stock shot" or a "library shot". Stock footage may have appeared in previous productions but may also be outtakes or footage shot for previous productions and not used. Examples of stock footage that might be utilized are moving images of cities and landmarks, wildlife in their natural environments, and historical footage. Suppliers of stock footage may be either rights managed or royalty-free. Many websites offer direct downloads of clips in various formats.

freeImages Website providing stock images

stock.xchng was a website providing free-to use stock photography and illustrations, its name being a reduced version of "stock exchange". The site was launched in February 2001 by Peter Hamza, and allows users to contribute, share and download high-resolution photographs and illustrations free of charge. Contributors are encouraged to submit material to enhance their photography career through wider public exposure. In 2009, the site had over 2,500,000 registered users and more than 400,000 photos. Until 2009 it operated parallel to its sister site, Stockxpert.com, until the site's parent company, Jupiterimages, was purchased by Getty Images, and the site is now tied in with the iStock library of paid images.

Mecklermedia was a U.S.-based corporation. The original WebMediaBrands was established in 1994, and headquartered in New York. Founded by Alan M. Meckler and Tristan Louis, the company provides business-to-business (B2B) services for creative, business and information technology professionals, including recruitment and event promotion.

Microstock photography, also known as micropayment photography, is a part of the stock photography industry. What defines a company as a microstock photography company is that they (1) source their images almost exclusively via the Internet, (2) do so from a wider range of photographers than the traditional stock agencies, and (3) sell their images at a very low rate for a royalty-free (RF) image.

iStock Microstock photography website

iStock is an online royalty free, international micro stock photography provider based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The firm offers millions of photos, illustrations, clip art, videos and audio tracks. Artists, designers and photographers worldwide contribute their work to iStock collections in return for royalties. Nearly half a million new photos, illustrations, videos and audio files, are added each month.

Shutterstock is an American provider of stock photography, stock footage, stock music, and editing tools; it is headquartered in New York. Founded in 2003 by programmer and photographer Jon Oringer, Shutterstock maintains a library of around 200 million royalty-free stock photos, vector graphics, and illustrations, with around 10 million video clips and music tracks available for licensing. Originally a subscription site only, Shutterstock expanded beyond subscriptions into a la carte pricing in 2008. It has been publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange since 2012.

Film director Pierce Rafferty grew up in Connecticut and moved to New York City in 1982. Some of his relatives include grandfather Marvin Pierce, president and later chairman of McCall Corporation, the publisher of the popular women's magazines Redbook and McCall's; and an early New England colonist named Thomas Pierce, also an ancestor to Franklin Pierce, the 14th President of the United States. Pierce attended Phillips Academy Andover and briefly attended Yale University.

<i>Armstrong & Getty</i>

Armstrong & Getty are the hosts of The Armstrong & Getty Show, a nationally syndicated morning drive radio show hosted by Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty. The talk show format is a mixture of libertarian political commentary, observations on local, national, and international news as well as reflections on social issues presented with humor.

Lewisohn Stadium was an amphitheater and athletic facility built on the campus of the City College of New York (CCNY). It opened in 1915 and was demolished in 1973.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Getty Research Institute</span> Organization with archives and databases for art history and provenance research

The Getty Research Institute (GRI), located at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California, is "dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts".

EMPICS, a PA Media company, is a UK firm which deals with licensing photographs of people and events for the press and other mass news media.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles O'Rear</span> American photographer

Charles O'Rear is an American photographer. His image Bliss was used as the default desktop wallpaper of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system. O'Rear started his career with the daily newspapers Emporia Gazette, The Kansas City Star, and Los Angeles Times; worked for National Geographic magazine; and was part of the Environmental Protection Agency's DOCUMERICA project. He began photographing winemaking in 1978.

WIN-Initiative is an independent stock photography company that licenses images based on global youth culture. Founded in 2007 by photographer Hans Neleman, WIN, which stands for Worldwide Image Navigation, licenses images from its community of photographers from around the world. Essentially functioning as a collective, WIN Scouts are located in 22 countries. These Scouts assist in finding and retaining new talent, as well as being the liaison with the WIN headquarters team in SoHo, New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alamy</span> British stock photography agency

Alamy is a British privately owned stock photography agency launched in September 1999. Its headquarters are in Milton Park, near Abingdon, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom. It has a development and operations centre at Technopark in Trivandrum, Kerala, India and a sales office in Brooklyn, New York, United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Visual China Group</span> Chinese photo and media agency

Visual China Group (VCG) is a Chinese photo and media agency. Established in 2000, it is a supplier of stock multimedia content to the commercial media industry. VCG is currently the largest stock image and media footage provider in China and third largest in the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Unsplash</span> Copyright-free stock photography website

Unsplash is a website dedicated to proprietary stock photography. Since 2021, it has been owned by Getty Images. The website claims over 265,000 contributing photographers and generates more than 16 billion photo impressions per month on their growing library of over 3.48 million photos. Unsplash has been cited as one of the world's leading photography websites by Forbes, Design Hub, CNET, Medium and The Next Web.

Tweak is an Irish-owned business, founded in 2008 by Jerry Kennelly. Kennelly is an entrepreneur from County Kerry who developed Stockbyte, which was acquired by Getty Images in 2006. Kennelly began developing Tweak two years after Stockbyte was acquired by Getty Images and was officially launched in 2011.