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Getty Images - the global visual content creator and marketplace with close to 635 million digital assets and 2.3 billion annual searches across its sites - says a Digital Asset Management (DAM) approach built on 'Intelligent Work Management' is saving significant time for the 700,000 media and advertising partners that rely on its imagery.
The result, according to Peter Orlowsky, SVP of Global Strategic Partnerships, is a centralized, cloud-based system that integrates seamlessly into customer creative workflows. A DAM operating at this scale also makes it easier for customers to search, tag, edit and distribute the assets they license, he says.
Orlowsky said:
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. Otherwise, the demands of managing volume during major spikes from global sporting events to awards season would just not be possible for us.
Essentially, this is technology that removes the gap between the shutter click and the global consumer.
Allowing customers to push a Getty asset straight into their own asset management and workflow systems - and then share and manage it in real time, internally and externally - also creates what Orlowsky calls "an incredibly valuable stickiness":
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.
Global scale
Orlowsky works for one of the world's largest stock image providers. Through its Getty Images, iStock and Unsplash brands, websites and APIs, the business claims to be "the first place" people turn to discover, purchase and share visual content from the world's leading photographers and videographers.
It works with more than 583,000 content creators and over 350 content partners, covers more than 160,000 news, sport and entertainment events a year, and maintains one of the largest privately-owned photographic archives in the world, dating back to the beginning of photography.
The company recorded full-year 2025 sales of just under $1 billion and, as of publication, is seeking regulatory approval for a proposed $3.7 billion merger with rival Shutterstock.
Moving from camera to customer
Orlowsky says a decision was taken in 2019 to overhaul the way images were being served to corporate customers. The challenge, he explains, was to move millions of high-value assets from "camera to customer" faster than before.
Orlowsky said:
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.
The team adopted Brandfolder, a DAM from Smartsheet, the vendor best known for its range of Intelligent Work Management solutions - and whose deployment at the US Special Olympics diginomica profiled in 2024. Brandfolder is described by Smartsheet as a DAM architected to support enterprise-grade volume, collaboration and speed of business. Internally and to Getty Images' customers, the platform is known as 'Media Manager.'
Media Manager works, Orlowsky explains, by automatically ingesting licensed Getty content and storing downloads and licensing details in one secure place. AI-powered tagging and contextual search turn what had been essentially static libraries into instantly navigable resources. Integrations with the tools creative and marketing teams already use - Adobe Creative Cloud, Box, Dropbox and Google Drive - hook the system into existing workflows, which he says enables smoother collaboration between marketing, editorial, design, partners and agencies across the Getty ecosystem.
Speed and quality
Asked to pinpoint the specific benefits for Getty Images, Orlowsky says the most important is the sheer amount of time the approach saves partners and customers.
High-fidelity assets are processed and made available globally in real time, meaning a sporting or fashion moment captured in Paris can be published in London, Sydney or New York seconds later. AI in Media Manager automatically tags and organizes millions of assets, enabling faster search, retrieval and deployment across campaigns and channels.
This is partly because Getty uses other Smartsheet products alongside Brandfolder to automate key workflows around image handling - including asset approvals, licensing checks, campaign tracking, forms-based asset requests, conditional logic and dashboard reporting.
Next steps
Getty Images has no specific interest at the moment in new ideas on its partner's roadmap, Orlowsky says, but plans to keep using Smartsheet to "double down" on being the premium content provider that plugs directly into customers' AI-enhanced, real-time workflows - making itself so central to how customers move and use imagery that the "stickiness" he is after persists.
In practice, he hints, that means ongoing real-time, high-volume, metadata-rich delivery and AI-assisted tagging to continue getting images from "point A to B as quickly as possible" - especially in high-tempo scenarios like the Olympics and other major sports and entertainment events.
That will mean a continued partnership with Smartsheet.
Orlowsky said:
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.
For Orlowsky, DAM at Getty Images has ultimately produced a workflow that genuinely helps customers work with content:
Now we're making it super-efficient to upload, to automate, to share and deliver the content in real time.
And I think that's where customers value us.