Getty Images, a titan in the global visual content creation and marketplace landscape, is fundamentally transforming how its vast network of media and advertising partners access and utilize its extensive library of nearly 635 million digital assets. Through a strategic implementation of a Digital Asset Management (DAM) approach underpinned by ‘Intelligent Work Management’ principles, the company is achieving significant time savings for its 700,000 partners, streamlining workflows from the moment an image is captured to its global distribution. This evolution, spearheaded by Peter Orlowsky, SVP of Partnerships and Business Development, centers on a centralized, cloud-based system designed for seamless integration into existing creative pipelines, enhancing the efficiency of searching, tagging, editing, and licensing visual content.

The Imperative for Real-Time Content Velocity

The sheer volume and pace of content generation at Getty Images necessitate a sophisticated operational framework. Orlowsky highlighted the critical need for real-time routing of content from photographers on assignment directly to the platform. "Our photographers might easily cover over 160,000 sporting and news events each year, so routing content in real time from shoot to platform is a must-have for both us and them," he stated. "Otherwise, the demands of managing volume during major spikes from global sporting events to awards season would just not be possible for us." This operational imperative drives the core of their technological advancement, aiming to eliminate the delay between the initial capture of an image and its consumption by a global audience. The system is designed to bridge this gap, ensuring that timely and relevant visual assets are available to partners with unprecedented speed.

Building Unprecedented Customer Stickiness

A key outcome of this advanced DAM strategy is the creation of what Orlowsky describes as "incredibly valuable stickiness" for their clientele. By enabling partners to seamlessly push Getty Images assets directly into their own internal asset management and workflow systems, and subsequently manage and share them in real-time, both internally and externally, the company fosters deep integration. "Once customers are using Getty content inside these workflows, they’re never going anywhere else, because we are solving all their problems in one place," Orlowsky elaborated. This integration transforms the traditional transactional relationship into a more embedded partnership, where Getty Images becomes an indispensable component of the client’s operational fabric.

Global Scale and Unparalleled Reach

Getty Images stands as one of the world’s preeminent stock image providers, operating under prominent brands such as Getty Images, iStock, and Unsplash. Through its extensive websites and APIs, the company asserts itself as the primary destination for discovering, purchasing, and sharing visual content from leading global photographers and videographers. The organization’s infrastructure supports a vast network of over 583,000 content creators and more than 350 content partners. Each year, Getty Images covers an impressive array of over 160,000 news, sport, and entertainment events, solidifying its position as a comprehensive chronicler of global happenings. Furthermore, it maintains one of the most extensive privately-owned photographic archives globally, with a historical reach extending back to the nascent days of photography itself. This deep archive represents an invaluable repository of visual history, underscoring the company’s enduring legacy and its commitment to preserving and making accessible significant moments.

Financially, Getty Images demonstrated robust performance, recording full-year 2025 sales approaching $1 billion. In a significant market development, the company is currently seeking regulatory approval for a proposed $3.7 billion merger with its rival, Shutterstock. This potential consolidation, if approved, would create an even larger entity in the visual content market, potentially reshaping competitive dynamics and service offerings within the industry. The strategic investment in its DAM capabilities appears to be a forward-looking move, designed to enhance its competitive edge and solidify its market leadership irrespective of the merger’s outcome.

A Strategic Overhaul: From Camera to Customer

The decision to overhaul image delivery processes for corporate clients was made in 2019, marking a pivotal moment in Getty Images’ operational evolution. The primary challenge identified was the need to expedite the transfer of millions of high-value assets from the point of capture – "camera to customer" – at a significantly accelerated pace. Orlowsky articulated the strategic rationale behind this initiative: "We had a product that we needed to evolve, so we went to market as we needed to be the cutting edge but were getting left behind." This acknowledgment of a potential competitive lag spurred a proactive and ambitious transformation.

Embracing Intelligent Work Management with Brandfolder

In pursuit of this accelerated delivery model, the Getty Images team adopted Brandfolder, a leading Digital Asset Management solution developed by Smartsheet. Smartsheet, renowned for its comprehensive suite of Intelligent Work Management solutions, has a proven track record of empowering organizations to optimize complex operational processes. The US Special Olympics, for instance, was profiled in 2024 for its successful implementation of Smartsheet to manage its extensive operations. Brandfolder, as described by Smartsheet, is engineered to handle enterprise-grade volumes of assets, facilitate robust collaboration, and accelerate business operations. Within Getty Images, this platform is internally recognized and utilized as ‘Media Manager.’

The Mechanics of Media Manager: AI-Powered Efficiency

Media Manager operates by automatically ingesting licensed Getty Images content, consolidating download and licensing details into a single, secure repository. The integration of AI-powered tagging and contextual search capabilities fundamentally transforms what were previously static image libraries into dynamic, instantly navigable resources. This AI-driven categorization allows for significantly faster and more accurate retrieval of assets. Crucially, Media Manager integrates seamlessly with the tools that creative and marketing teams already rely on, including Adobe Creative Cloud, Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive. This interoperability ensures that the system is embedded within existing workflows, fostering smoother collaboration across marketing, editorial, design teams, partners, and agencies throughout the Getty Images ecosystem. This comprehensive integration minimizes the need for users to learn entirely new systems, thereby reducing adoption friction and maximizing immediate utility.

Quantifiable Benefits: Speed, Quality, and Time Savings

The most significant benefit derived from this intelligent DAM approach, as identified by Orlowsky, is the substantial time savings realized by both partners and customers. The system ensures that high-fidelity assets are processed and made available globally in real time, enabling a sporting or fashion moment captured in one location, such as Paris, to be published in cities like London, Sydney, or New York within seconds. The AI embedded within Media Manager plays a pivotal role by automatically tagging and organizing millions of assets. This meticulous organization dramatically expedites the search, retrieval, and deployment of imagery across various campaigns and distribution channels.

Furthermore, Getty Images leverages other Smartsheet products in conjunction with Brandfolder to automate critical workflows associated with image handling. These automated processes encompass asset approvals, licensing verification, campaign tracking, form-based asset requests, conditional logic implementation, and comprehensive dashboard reporting. This holistic approach to workflow automation extends beyond simple asset storage and retrieval, encompassing the entire lifecycle of visual content management. The ability to track campaigns in real-time, manage requests through intuitive forms, and receive immediate, data-rich reports empowers marketing and creative teams with greater control and efficiency.

Future Trajectory: Deepening Integration and AI Enhancement

Looking ahead, Getty Images remains focused on reinforcing its position as a premium content provider that integrates directly into customers’ AI-enhanced, real-time workflows. While the company currently has no immediate plans for exploring new features on Smartsheet’s development roadmap, the ongoing strategy involves "doubling down" on this core integration. The aim is to make Getty Images so central to how customers manage and utilize visual imagery that the desired "stickiness" becomes an enduring characteristic of their client relationships.

This strategic direction implies a continued emphasis on real-time, high-volume delivery of metadata-rich content. AI-assisted tagging will remain a cornerstone, ensuring that images are moved from their point of origin to their destination as swiftly as possible, particularly during high-tempo periods such as major sporting events like the Olympics and other significant global entertainment occasions. This sustained focus on efficiency and speed, especially during peak demand, underscores the critical role of their technological infrastructure.

The ongoing partnership with Smartsheet is therefore central to Getty Images’ future plans. "We want to stay focused on our core strength – creating premium visual content – while relying on this for the best-in-class technology layer that moves that content efficiently to customers," Orlowsky affirmed. This strategic division of labor allows Getty Images to concentrate on its expertise in content creation, while entrusting the complexities of efficient content delivery and management to a specialized technology partner.

Ultimately, the implementation of DAM at Getty Images has yielded a workflow that genuinely empowers customers. "Now we’re making it super-efficient to upload, to automate, to share and deliver the content in real time," Orlowsky concluded. "And I think that’s where customers value us." This customer-centric approach, driven by technological innovation and a deep understanding of workflow challenges, positions Getty Images not just as a content provider, but as a strategic partner in the creative and media industries, enabling unparalleled efficiency and value for its global clientele. The ongoing evolution of their DAM system, powered by Intelligent Work Management, signifies a commitment to leading the industry in how visual content is discovered, managed, and utilized in an increasingly dynamic digital world.