Actually, the copyright those nicer versions sometimes claim already lead to this exact situation, with publishers making the case that the derivative work should be awarded new copyright.

Here however it is clear-cut, the photos are not modified.

Oh but surely the images were optimised for computer display in a non-trivial process!

That's actually not totally unreasonable. Also maybe getty ran some clever image recognition to auto tag them up and organise them all? That's all a useful charge-able service. Going after existing usage is clearly BS, though.

She just had her photo up on her website. They clearly went after her without any reason to believe she used their "clever organization" image searching service. These scumbags were probably using an image recognition bot to scrape the web for all usage and spraying everyone with legal letters.

Certainly, not probably. Getty purchased picscout in the past few years, a company making and using such bot, and sending automated demand letter.