ZUMA Press

According to ZUMA, Scott Mc Kiernan created the first downloadable editorial picture website in 1992; the company describes itself as a B-to-B Internet pioneer in digital-image transmission even before Net usage became widespread.⁠[1][1]

ZUMA Press was started by photojournalists for photojournalists, founded in 1993 and incorporated in 1995; the company also publicly gives 1995 as its founding year, celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2005, and celebrated its 30th birthday in 2025. Besides meaning “new day” in Mayan, the word “ZUMA” is also the name of Mc Kiernan’s black Labrador.⁠[1][1][2][2][3][1]

In 2003, ZUMA began representing images from the Sacramento Bee, expanding its newspaper picture syndication business.⁠[2]

On June 15, 2005, ZUMA, then based in Laguna Beach, California, and describing itself as America’s largest independent picture agency, announced that it had obtained worldwide rights to represent the daily picture production and years of archives of the Minnesota daily Star Tribune; it was the second McClatchy Company paper ZUMA had signed, after the Sacramento Bee. At the time, ZUMA also represented images from more than a dozen publications, including The Sporting News, the Palm Beach Post, the San Antonio Express-News, London’s Daily Mail, Spain’s ABC, and Canada’s Toronto Star, and it represented the work of over 900 professional photographers.⁠[2][2][2][2][2]

In 2006, ZUMA launched Zeus, a next-generation image database it developed itself; according to the company, it can handle collections of unlimited size and showed no loss in speed in a test with 90 million images.⁠[1][1]

In its annual report for fiscal year 2007, Getty ImagesGetty ImagesGetty Images is a visual content company headquartered in Seattle, United States, whose three brands, Getty Images, iStock, and Unsplash, license creative images, editorial images such as news and sports pictures, video, and music. Its holding company, Getty Images Holdings, Inc., was listed on the New York Stock Exchange from 2022 and has traded over the counter since September 2026.Open the full entry listed ZUMA Press, Inc. alongside ReutersReutersReuters is an international news agency founded in London in 1851 by Paul Julius Reuter and is now the news business of Thomson Reuters. It provides text, photo, video, and graphics coverage to media and institutional clients and distributes it through channels such as Reuters Connect.Open the full entry and the Associated Press as specialized visual content companies well established in their respective market segments, among its main competitors.⁠[4]

On August 21, 2015, ZUMA announced that it had begun representing current and archival news, sports, and entertainment images from Australia’s Fairfax Syndication, whose content comes from more than 300 publications and websites, including the Australian Financial Review, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and the Canberra Times.⁠[5][5][5][5]

On June 16, 2016, ZUMA announced that it was distributing Reuters images through its news feed, becoming a distributor of Reuters images in the United States and Latin America, including more than 8 million archival news, sports, and entertainment images.⁠[6][6][6]

On March 7, 2023, ZUMA launched ZUMA Entertainment, an Instagram account publishing only entertainment images. Spearheaded by photo editor Jessica Cotsonas, it offers a daily curation of images from music, movies, television, the performing arts, and fashion.⁠[7][7][7]

On April 17, 2025, ZUMA launched the curated website The Pictures of the Week to celebrate its 30th birthday, with veteran photo editor James K. Colton selecting 28 images from each week’s pictures. At the time, ZUMA received more than 47,000 images every day, from its own photographers and from the 33 national wire services and more than 60 picture agencies it represents.⁠[3][3][3]

ZUMA Press describes itself as the world’s largest independent press agency and wire service, producing and representing news, sports, and entertainment images and representing content from other picture agencies, newspapers, and magazine groups; the company is staffed around the clock, has major bureaus in Hollywood, London, and Hamburg, and adds more than 50,000 new images to its archive every day. As of October 8, 2026, its website had about 113.6 million images online. Its other products include the curated website The Pictures Of The Day, the picture magazine DOUBLEtruck, the high-end photojournalism service zReportage, and the photojournalism gallery The KONA Gallery. Under the Z Solutions name, ZUMA also customizes and licenses its digital-image processing and storage system for other organizations with large picture collections, with clients including Immediate Media, MediaNews, EFE, Daily Mail Syndication, Oregon State University, and Keystone Picture Agency.⁠[1][1][8][1][1][8][1][1][1][1][1][1]

ZUMA Press: Official website: https://www.zumapress.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

Instagram (ZUMA Entertainment): Public account: https://www.instagram.com/zumaentertainment (opens in a new window)⁠[7]