Using a Photo You Did Not Take

The rule, stated plainly

Somebody owns every photograph, and that somebody is usually whoever took it.

Finding an image, saving it, and putting it on your site is copying it. That is the same act whether the image was easy to find or not.

Being publicly visible is not permission. Neither is crediting the photographer, linking to the source, or having found it on a site that itself was using it without permission.

This is not a technicality that nobody enforces. There is an industry built on finding unlicensed images and invoicing the businesses using them.

What actually happens when it goes wrong

Worth knowing, because it is more mundane and more expensive than people expect.

A letter arrives, from the photographer or an agency acting for them, identifying the image and demanding a fee. The fee is frequently far more than a licence would have cost.

Removing the image at that point does not end the claim, because the use already happened.

Most of these settle for a payment. Some are chased hard. Almost none are worth the argument, and the amount is usually several hundred to a few thousand dollars for one photograph.

The business is liable even if a designer or an employee put the image there without telling anybody.

Where images come from and where you stand

• You took it. Yours, subject to what is in the frame.
• An employee took it at work. Usually the business's, and worth confirming.
• A contractor took it. Frequently theirs unless the contract says otherwise.
• Licensed stock. Yours to use within the licence terms.
• A supplier's product images. Usually permitted for selling their product, and worth checking.
• Found in a search. Not yours, whatever the source appeared to be.

The third catches businesses regularly. Paying a photographer for a shoot does not automatically transfer copyright, and the licence you received may be narrower than you assumed.

A worked example

A restaurant whose website used a photograph of a dish, saved years earlier from a search, believed by everybody to be a stock image.

Four years later a letter arrived from an agency representing the photographer, with a screenshot, an invoice and a licence history showing what the image normally cost.

The demand was several times a normal licence fee.

They removed the image, which did not resolve anything, and settled for a reduced amount after some correspondence.

Nobody in the business had acted dishonestly. The image had been added by somebody who assumed that anything findable was usable.

The photographs they replaced it with were taken on a phone, of their own food, and were better anyway.

Free image sites

Legitimate and worth understanding rather than trusting blindly.

Several sites offer images free for commercial use under a clear licence. Those are genuinely usable and they are a reasonable option.

What to check: the licence terms, which occasionally exclude certain uses; whether attribution is required; and whether the site verifies uploads, since some carry images uploaded by people who did not own them.

Keep a record of where each image came from and the date, because a licence you cannot evidence is a licence you may as well not have.

A screenshot of the download page, saved with the image, takes seconds and is what you would need if anybody ever asked.

The counter-case

Where using somebody else's image is fine.

Product images supplied by a manufacturer for selling their products, where the whole purpose is that retailers use them. Check the terms and it is usually explicit.

Images a customer has given you with clear permission to publish, which should be in writing rather than remembered.

Properly licensed stock, within the terms of the licence, including any limits on how many copies or which media.

And images that are genuinely out of copyright, which for photographs means old enough that the term has expired, and is a narrower category than people assume.

What is in the frame matters too

A separate question from who took the photograph.

People in an image have rights about how their likeness is used commercially, which is why a photograph of a customer needs their agreement even if you took it.

Artwork, signage, distinctive products and buildings can carry their own protections in some circumstances.

And somebody's home, garden or premises may be photographable and not publishable without asking, which is a courtesy question as much as a legal one.

Owning the photograph is necessary and not always sufficient.

Auditing what you already have

1. List every image on the site and where it came from.
2. Mark anything you cannot account for.
3. Replace or license those, rather than hoping.
4. Check anything a previous supplier added, which is where most problems live.
5. Keep licence records for everything going forward.

The fourth is the highest-risk category. A site built by somebody else years ago frequently contains images nobody in the business chose, with no record of their origin.

Telling a supplier what you need

The conversation worth having at the point of commissioning rather than afterwards.

When paying a photographer, agree in writing what you may do with the images: which media, for how long, and whether you may edit or crop them.

Broad usage costs more than narrow usage, which is why quotes differ and why the cheapest is sometimes the most restricted.

What most small businesses want is unlimited use on their own marketing indefinitely, which is worth asking for explicitly rather than assuming.

The same applies to a designer or an agency adding images to your site: ask where each came from and get the licence records at handover.

Doing that at the start costs one email. Reconstructing it four years later, when a letter arrives, is considerably harder.

The simplest answer

Use your own photographs.

They are free, they are unambiguously yours, they show your actual work, and they are considerably more persuasive than any stock image of somebody else's kitchen.

A business that photographs its own work has no exposure here at all, and a better website as a side effect.

Which makes the photography habit worth building for a reason entirely beyond the quality of the images themselves.

How to take them is covered in taking a usable photo on a phone.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.