Getty Images, the world’s largest photo agency, has made vast swathes of its library free to use, in an effort to combat piracy.

Millions of images – including famous shots of Marilyn Monroe and Barack Obama – will now be available without cost to blogs and social media sites.

The photos use a code that links back to Getty’s website.

Getty said it had made the move after realising thousands of its images were being used without attribution.

“Our content was everywhere already,” said Craig Peters, a business development executive at the Seattle-based company.

“If you want to get a Getty image today, you can find it without a watermark very simply,” he added.

“The way you do that is you go to one of our customer sites and you right-click. Or you go to Google Image search or Bing Image Search and you get it there. And that’s what’s happening.”

 Images can be shared by copying a simple code from the Getty website

The company says it is making up to 35 million photos available through the new “embed tool“, and images can also be shared on social media sites Twitter and Tumblr.

So here’s a small selection of images from Getty’s library that we can now show on the site.