Image by shell_ghostcage
A quite common practice to pep up your articles with images is to look them up in the biggest library of apparently free images: Google Search. But the internet is not synonymous to a free image- and photography stock, even if it might look like. This misjudgement can even get expensive, since using images of others without asking for permission most often infringes copyright. Against the wrong common understanding, copyright doesn’t need to be claimed by the author – it is naturally inborn in every work of creation. Therefore by default everything is copyrighted, and you are not allowed to republish anything without the specific permission by the author.
But even if applied naturally to everything, the author can decide to allow the use of his work under certain conditions and for a certain price. This is called licensing. Regarding photography and images, the following licence models exist:
Royalty Managed
Royalty Managed material is the most expensive, calculated by distribution range, size, type of media and exclusive use. Since the license is clearly connected to a person or company, it is easy to find out if an image is licensed or used illegal. The biggest company in this sector is Getty Images, and they have legal departments worldwide that investigate and sue the unlicensed use of such images. Naively copying images of unknown sources straight out of the depth of the internet can result in a rude and expensive awakening.
Royalty Free
Royalty Free images are far cheaper, because there is no exclusive usage rights. Good resources are:
fotolia.com
Even if Adobe bought them recently, their prices stood stable and you can still get images in small size for websites starting from less than two bucks. Yet, if you need bigger sizes, the cost increases quickly and other price models as the following are the better choice.
istockphoto.com
Bought by Getty Images a while ago, they lost the option to get cheap images for a buck, and images from the essentials collection cost around 8€ in any size when paying per download with credits. Be aware that the smallest pack starts at 24€ for 3 credits, while for 35€ monthly subscription you already get 10 images instead of 3, reducing the price per image to 3,50€ in any size! So while a small version for the internet gets more expensive than on fotolia with their size-based credit structure, medium or big images for printed materials get quickly more expensive over there. Also it is worth to spend a few minutes searching your favourite image over on the other stock sites, because many photographers publish their work on more than one, leaving you with more pricing options to choose across different providers.
shutterstock.com
Again a bit of another pricing model for another great collection of images. Here you can get credit packs for all sizes starting from 39€ for 5 images (= 8€ per image as istockphoto), but if you only need small and medium sizes you get 12 images for the same price (= 3,30€ being similar costs as the monthly subscription on istockphoto, just that here you have a credit pack instead, valid longer but you cannot download the high resolutions).
bigstockphoto.com
At this sub-brand of shutterstock, you get 10 credits for 30€ and 25 for 39€ with 48% saving. Price increases with size up to 6 credits though. BUT they have superb subscription plans with 5 downloads per day for 49€/month, leaving you with 0,33€ per image in any size. This is really fabulous, if you are anyhow sitting in front of your screen daily and get a bunch of desired images prepared in advance. Subscribing for more months gets you even down to 0,18€ per image.
123rf.com
Similar to fotolia, the pricing starts around 1,30 for one credit, for which you get a small sized image. The bigger the resolution, the more credits it takes, but compared to fotolia, the increase is not exponential making it the cheaper solution.
dreamstime.com
Another low budget provider starting with 15,- for 11 images, appearing like the cheapest solution, but they work with so called levels that multiply the credits. A level 5 image starts therefore at 11 credits for the smallest size, making dreamstime even a very expensive choice, while having the worst website.
Creative Commons
The Creative Commons (CC) licenses offer the right to use the images for free, but attribution in form of a credit of the photographer must be made. There are six types of CC licenses, combining attribution, share-alike obligation, non-commercial and non-derivation restrictions. The Creative Commons vision is nowadays widely spread and ever growing and can be seen as the vanguard of the new age in the field of copyright.
„It is a non-profit that helps sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge via free legal and technological tools. These tools are not alternatives to copyright laws, rather they work alongside them“
CC is growing and spreading very fast, not only with images: in June 2011 YouTube integrated the CC-license into their service, starting with 10.000 videos. In July 2012 there were already 4 Million CC-licensed videos uploaded to YouTube!
As mentioned before, any work is copyrighted by nature, but by publishing his work under the CC license, the author abdicates his rights and allows the usage under the defined licensing terms. This decision is irreversible and he cannot take it back afterwards, so as long as the licensing conditions are kept, CC images offer a perfect image pool based on very human aspects as sharing, respect and appreciation. When using the images on a website, attribution in the disclaimer should be enough and is much better than 90% of all people do. Read the official page or this excellent overview of the license models CC 0 (PD), CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA, CC BY-NC-ND to understand the symbols and accronyms that combine the following elements:
- By (BY): Besideds the Creative Commons Zero or Public Domain License, all other licenses demand to attribute the author, title and license of the work (read here how to properly attribute).
- Share Alike (SA): If you alter, compose, transform or otherwise change the image, you need to release the resulting image under the same license.
- No Derivatives (ND): You are not allowed to alter the image in any way, but need to use it exactly as it is. What is an alternation and what not can not be definetily defined, one reason being the fact that the laws of the country of the publisher are the fundament of decision and they differ. Mostly it is said that a derivate is only one if the result is so much transformed that it became its own copyrightable work, which would leave a small freedom of adaption to at least improve contrast or cropping, while in other parts it reads more like you are not allowed anything.
- No Commercial Use (NC): You are not allowed to use the image for any commercial purposes. Also here it cannot be definetily defined what and what not commercial is, and in case you want to publish in a media that has the slightest attempt to “transfer money from other’s pockets into yours”, you might be safer to stay away from those images.
Model and property release
Besides the copyright of the photographer, a model or property release is another aspect to look into. While you are safe with buying stock photography of the above mentioned stock sites (since they take care for releases), with Creative Commons material or any other private photos the rights of publicity/privacy are entering the scene. As we can read on the Creative Commons website:
Beyond copyright, others may have rights that you will need to clear in order to use a work, whether you or someone else is the copyright holder. These are known as third party rights, and may include confidential information, trademarks, and rights of publicity/privacy. If you have obtained material that is confidential in nature from a third party, you should not include it in your grant output without written permission to do so. If you use a third party’s trademarks, be sure your use is consistent with any trademark policies the company or person may have established, and ask permission if you are uncertain. For photographs, videos, voice recordings or other media, if a person or a person’s likeness is identifiable (including voice), then whether you are the copyright owner or not you should make sure that person has signed a release form that allows you to use the photograph, video or voice recording in your CC-licensed work.
The photographer itself is free to shoot, publish and even sell his photos without getting the permission of the persons, but the final use is making the difference. The law applied here is the national law of the publisher and therefore differs. But in general the following aspects make the difference:
Identifiable or not?
The privacy law becomes operative as soon as a person is clearly identifiable on the photo. So photos from the back or with face covered will not fall under this law in most countries.
Editorial or commercial?
If the person is clearly visible, the context of publishing is the next criteria. In editorial publications as news or articles, photos of recognizable people or trademarked items taken in public is called “fair use” and doesn’t need a release of the displayed persons. But whenever an identifiable person is shown in a commercial or advertisement, his approval is needed. To be more precise, it is all about association and the fact if “the use of the photo implies that the person agrees with the underlying message” which can even be the case in non-profit environment. This represents the main aspect of whether a release is needed, and since in advertisement and other occasions usually statements or environments are created that the depicted person is associated with, it is for sure adviseable to use royalty-free images or to make sure the photographer has a signed model release to avoid any legal issues.
Religious delicacy
However, if a religious organization wanted to use an image, they’re almost assuredly going to need a release, because people have a right to be associated (or not) with religious points of view. So, if there is any hint of religious dogma, bias, or promotion, privacy law doesn’t recognize the use of the image as “editorial.” The easy test is to look at who the publisher is. If it’s a religious institution, or if there any any affiliation with a religious person or organization, chances are really high it would be regarded as a use that would require a release from the subject of the photo.
(These informations about releases I’ve found on Dan Heller‘s website where you can read a complete investigation about this difficult subject)
Re-publishing
A last issue to be mentioned is the fact that sometimes people take copyrighted material of others and publish it under their name or account under a CC license. So in case the photo simply looks too good, too articistic or any other way of making it very unlikely that someone will give it away for free, again it is better to double-check before using it.
Image Sources
A good starting point containing some portals to choose from is search.creativecommons.org. But you can also directly use the search functions on these sites and use the licensing options in the respective menu:
images.google.com
After searching for an image, click on “Search Tools” to activate the submenu. Under “Usage rights” you find the filter to restrict the results according to the Creative Commons label. The filtering here is bundling the licenses in a bit complicated way, and it is pointed out in differents articles across the web that Google is kind of “assuming” this information and therefore not at all a reliable source. So if you use this filtered search, always doublecheck on the source site about the real license behind the image.
commons.wikimedia.org
Wikimedia Commons is another source which doesn’t reach the professional level of the following sites, but the licensing can clearly be seen and it offers a prepared code for attribution that otherwise has to be compiled manually. In this regard they are exemplary, but the selection of images and the user experience is limited.
flickr.com
One of the biggest photo services. Most people put their photos under one of the CC licenses there, making it a precious source. Unfortunately it is not so easy to save and organize the images, because the downloaded file has certain number combinations that can not be searched for later. The quality of the search results depends on the term, but high quality images are not so easy to find.
500px.com
Definetily the best quality source of high quality photos by really great photographers. I guess this sentence says all, see for yourself the vastness of beauty offered there. The filtering is clearly structrued, but each category only shows images from that category, so if you are searching for an image that you don’t want to modify and not use commercially (giving you the possibility to use any CC license), you still need to go through all of them particularly because they are not including the respective lower/narrower licenses.
Public Domain
Public Domain (PD or CC 0) images are free to use without any restrictions and without attribution. The kindness of such photographers should still be honoured with a voluntary credit. After all it is not about the saved money, but a simple human aspect of appreciation and respect for the work of others, which we can express by crediting their name or even sending a small donation. Two very famous sites are:
Special Licenses
Some providers of free images also define their own licenses:
Getty Images free embedding
When realizing that they cannot control the copyright infringements of their images, Getty Images opened their archives to the blogging world. Millions of their images can now be used for free. Free in the sense of not paying money, but on the high price of selling your website to become a free advertising portal for Getty. You can find the option “Embed image” below most of their collection and you are only allowed to use them with a prepared code that is even coming with an iframe, opening Getty any possibility – they might even start to put real advertising banners once enough bloggers have used their images to not backtrack easily any more. But even if their policy will not go that far, already now each image has its own social share buttons appearing on hover and a bottom text bar. I recommend to not support and to stay away from such practices, even if the temptation for free material might be big.
Asking for permission
A last option that might not come to mind automatically is the good old communication from man to man. Especially in case of artistic images that we find somewhere in the internet and that are not available under any of the before mentioned modalities, we can also think of the old-fashioned way: asking. Most artists will be very happy to hear the request – and the respect you simply express by asking instead of just grabbing – and will happily allow you to use it with a small attribution.
Which image sources do you use? How is your experience with the mentioned ones? Let us know in the comments…
