The image license types are many and if you are new to photo licensing everything can be quite confusing. There are, at least, around 20+ different types of image licenses out there. Some are for personal, non-commercial use only, some are for commercial use of an image. Using stock photos requires an image license. If you want to use a photo, you need to understand its license type. You also need a license when selling your own photos. I looked a bit into the most common image licenses and prepared this overview for you!
What you can find here:
First of all… What is an Image License?
An image license is basically an agreement between the creator of the picture and the person buying it. In official industry jargon, the creator is also referred to as ‘author’.
The author of the picture can be either the photographer, if the picture is a photo capture, or the composer, in case of digital compositions, digital paintings, mixed media works, and so on. The author holds all the intellectual property rights to the picture. He or she is the only one to decide whether they want to make the image available for somebody else to use and under what conditions.
That means the author can choose the license type and determine the fee they want to sell the image for. However, the author can also decide to make the image available for free!
In some cases, you may obtain the image license over an agency and not directly from the author. Such an agency is often a stock image website. Well-known stock image are, for example, depositphotos.com and shutterstock.com. All authors must have previously authorized the agency to sell their works on their behalf.
All Image License Types require a License Agreement
An image license agreement always needs to be done in writing. It is a written contract between the creator of the image, the licensor, and the buyer of the image, the licensee.
The image license agreement then grants the licensee certain usage rights to the image. It also defines whether the licensee must pay a fee to use the image (licensing fee) or whether they may use it for free.
If you are a photographer or other type of visual creator, chances are you wish to earn money with your work and license your images for certain uses. When you do so, it is important to exactly outline how the buyer may use it, for how long they may use the image, and how much they have to pay for it.
You can decide whether you want to make your images available for commercial use or for personal use only.
Commercial Image License Types
If you choose to make your image available for commercial use, you can decide for which medium the image may be used.
Can the buyer use the image for print items or for digital items, or for both? You are also free to determine the number of copies the buyer can make with your picture. Let’s say the buyer would like to use your image to print postcards. Are they allowed to create 50,000 copies of postcards or 100,000? You decide!
You may also limit the time period within which the buyer can make use of the picture. The minimum period is usually one year, and can be extended up to 3 years, 5 years, or whatever you agree upon!
There’s a whole lot of image license types that offer you all kinds of options to make your work available to others. Beside paid licenses, there are different licenses that are free of charge.
Each license regulates specific scopes and limitations of usage for the image. So, with you being the author of an image and wanting to sell your work, it’s key to have an idea about the image license types available on the market.
With that said, let’s jump in and have a look at the free licenses first.
What are the Image License Types?
FREE Image License Types
Creative Commons (CC) Licenses
If you have ever downloaded an image from any of the free stock websites, e.g. pixabay.com or freepik.com, you have downloaded it under a Creative Commons License.
Creative Commons are probably the best-known and the most wide-spread image license types on the Internet.
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization located in the United States. The organization was established in 2001. Its aim is to help authors gain exposure for their creative works and provide them with an easy means to license their pictures at no cost.
Even though Creative Commons licenses are free of charge, they still regulate exactly the conditions of usage. This allows the author to protect their work and still make it available for free to a broader audience.
All Creative Commons Licenses require an Attribution to the Author
Creative Commons always require an attribution to the author. That means, if you use the image, for example, on your website or your blog, you must credit the creator.
A lot of photographers use Creative Commons as a marketing strategy. They upload their photos to free stock platforms under a specific CC license. If somebody likes the photo, they can download it, put it on their website and add a link to the author. That way, the user benefits by getting a beautiful image for free, and the author benefits by gaining more exposure to their work.
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Eventually, more clients may take an interest in buying works from that author. The author may then license more of their work for a fee under a different license agreement. It’s a win-win for everybody!
Creative Commons alone offers you a whole set of different licenses. You may choose one of their four baseline-rights licenses, or you may combine different baseline-rights license options according to your custom needs. The possible combinations of baseline options lead to further eleven valid Creative Commons licenses.
To bring some light into that licensing jumble, let’s have a look at the baseline CC licenses first. Then we’ll see how they may be combined to create more specific licensing conditions.
What do all Creative Commons Licenses have in common?
All Creative Commons licenses are public copyright licenses. They all allow the free use of a copyrighted work. And they all grant you the right to share, use and build upon the licensed work. Apart from the public domain-type license (CC0), they all require an attribution to the author.
Furthermore, all Creative Commons image license types are non-exclusive and non-revocable. Once you obtain a work under a Creative Commons license, you may continue to use it under that license forever.
If the work is protected by several Creative Commons licenses, you as the user may choose the license.
In what do Creative Commons Licenses differ?
Creative Commons licenses differ by the various combinations that the author may choose to apply. Different combinations lead to special conditions of use and terms of distribution.
Now you may wonder, ‘why are there so many options of image license types at all??’
Creative Commons’ objective is to offer the author a lot of flexibility to protect their work and still make it publicly available. For example, the author can decide whether the work may be used for commercial purposes or just for personal matters.
The author can also control whether or not the user has the right to make derivative works.
The four Creative Commons Baseline-Rights Licenses
CC-BY: Attribution to the Author
CC-SA: Share-alike, Permission to Distribute Derivative Works
CC-NC: Non-commercial, Permission to use for personal purposes
CC-ND: Non-derivative works, No Permission to create your own work with the original and share it
Five frequent Creative Commons Baseline-Rights Combinations
CC BY-SA Attribution + ShareAlike
(Commercial use and derivative works allowed)
CC BY-NC Attribution + Noncommercial
(No commercial use, derivative works allowed)
CC BY-NC-SA Attribution + Noncommercial + ShareAlike
(No commercial use, derivative works allowed)
CC BY-ND Attribution + NoDerivatives
(Commercial use allowed, no derivative works)
CC BY-NC-ND Attribution + Noncommercial + NoDerivatives
(No commercial use, no derivatives)
Public Domain Image License
Technically, the ‘Public Domain’ isn’t even an image license as such. If an image is ‘in the Public Domain’, it means that the author’s copyright to it has expired.
After the copyright to an image expires, it automatically becomes available in the Public Domain. Everybody who likes the picture can now use it for whatever they like without restrictions.
→ 7 PRO TIPS How To Protect Your Art Online
However, there is no universal rule for when the image becomes part of the public domain. This always depends on the country in which the image was originally created.
There is also a Creative Commons license for the Public Domain. It’s the Creative Commons Zero (CC0). The CC0 license can be applied to an image that is already in the public domain to mark it as such. It can also be used by authors that want to make their work publicly available without any restrictions.
The CC0 license relinquishes the copyright of an image. That means also a recently created image, whose copyright has not yet legally expired, is now available in the public domain under the same non-restrictive conditions.
Copyright Free License
With the Copyright Free License, the author of the image gives away the copyright of their work for free!
This allows you to do anything you want with the picture. You may use it for commercial purposes, modify it, or use it in your own creations that you are going to sell. You don’t even need to credit the author when you use their work.
Now you might wonder, ‘why would any photographer gladly give away the copyright to their image for free??’ Well, a photographer might decide to do so to get publicity from the image and in return increase the sales of their licensed works.
However, as you may guess, this is definitely not the best way to gain more exposure. The user of the image might decide to not credit the author, or modify the picture in a way that the original image may not be recognized any more.
So, Copyright Free Licenses are not a guarantee for public attention. A Creative Commons License is certainly the better option for everybody who wishes to get their work seen out there and receive some sort of guaranteed reward in return (e.g. with a creditable mention or a backlink to their work).
To cut a long story short, the Copyright Free License is not a popular license type and not many photographers make use of it.
PAID Image License Types
Royalty-Free (RF) License
‘Royalty-Free’ is another term that you’ve surely come across. It is a commonly used license for paid images. In fact, the Royalty Free license is the default license type for selling stock images. All the major stock photo agencies use this license type. This includes Shutterstock, Dreamstime, and Depositphotos.
However, the word ‘free’ in the name is quite confusing: royalty-free images are neither free of charge nor are they free to use. When you buy a royalty-free image, you pay once, and then you can use it in many different contexts.
A royalty-free license never transfers the author’s copyright over to you when you purchase the image. The copyright remains with the actual author. That means the RF license is a non-exclusive rights license.
The license allows you to use the downloaded image for the creation of physical and digital items for personal, non-commercial use. What exactly does that mean? First of all, you may create ‘physical’ items. A physical item can be a poster, a postcard, or a calendar. You can also use the image to have a mug printed for yourself, a mouse pad, or a phone cover.
As for ‘digital’ items, you can use the image on your website, in an e-mail or as a screensaver on your computer.
The Standard Royalty Free License allows only Non-Commercial, Personal Use
Personal, non-commercial use means you are not allowed to resell the image or create new work using the licensed image and then sell that work.
You are also not allowed to use the image, let’s say on a mug, and then sell that mug. Briefly, you cannot put anything on sale that includes a royalty-free licensed image.
→ What Is Commercial Use Of An Image?
Sometimes, the license may limit the number of times you can use the image for personal, non-commercial purposes. For instance, you might only be allowed to use the image 500,000 times to have a mug printed for yourself. Usually, these limitation numbers are so high that they basically don’t restrict you using the image in personal matters. After all, who needs 500,000 mugs to sip their coffee?
Grab your FREE Royalty-Free License Agreement Template now
If you still want to have 500,001 coffee mugs or you want to create your own work with the image and resell it, then you will need to have a Royalty Free Extended License. So let’s see what that is:
Royalty-Free Extended License (RF-EL)
As its name says, the Royalty-Free Extended License ‘extends’ the regulations of the standard royalty-free license.
It allows you to use the purchased image to sell items or otherwise distribute them. You can use the image to create your own digital compositions and then sell your work. You can include the image in a website and then sell the website to one of your customers, if you’re website designer.
Or, you can resell the 500,001 coffee mugs that you’re having at home. ☺
In some cases, there may still be a limit upon the maximum number of times you can use the image. In many instances, the volume is also unlimited.
Royalty-Free Extended License Types
Print-Extended License (P-EL)
The Print Extended License is what you need when you want to use the purchased image to sell anything that requires some sort of printing. This includes posters, postcards, calendars, pillowcases, books, newspapers, magazines, clothes, phone covers, and so on.
Web-Extended License (W-EL)
Grab your FREE Extended Royalty-Free License Agreement Template now
Sell the Rights Extended License (SR-EL)
The last of the Extended Licenses is the Sell the Rights License. This is usually the most expensive of all image license types because you transfer your copyright to the buyer.
That means after having sold the image, you have no more rights to it. The buyer may now use the picture as they like, because they have the exclusive rights to it.
It also means that you must remove the image from all sites where you had it displayed – from your own website, from portfolios you have on other websites, and from all stock image platforms where you offered the image for sale. And, of course, you cannot sell that image again.
This license is typically used when the buyer wants to create their own company logo with the image or use it for other branding purposes.
If you don’t want to sell off your rights to the picture forever, you may also restrict the time period of the usage. The minimum period is usually one year. This can be extended up to 2 years, 3 years, 5 years…. Setting a time limit tends to decrease the purchase price for the image.
However, after the time lime has expired, you can restart to use your image as before: you can display it on different websites, include it back into your portfolio, and offer it for sale again under whatever license you wish.
Rights-Managed License (RM)
A Rights-Managed License agreement defines everything down to the last detail: WHERE can you use the image, HOW MANY times can you use the image, HOW LONG can you use the image, IN WHAT SIZE and IN WHAT INDUSTRY can you use it?
The benefit of this image license is that the buyer can exclusively license the image for use in their industry and a competitor will not be able to license the same image again. Double licensing can become a problem with Royalty-Free pictures where anyone can download and use an image.
Therefore, creating branding with RM-licensed images is often difficult for a company if they want to stand out using a particular image.
Rights-Managed Licenses, on the other hand, are very restrictive when it comes to the use of an image. You even need to re-license the image again if you want to use it in a different medium or a different size.
Rights-Managed Licenses belong to the most expensive image license types as well.
Editorial Use License
The last image license type we’re going to talk about is the Editorial Use License. Images that depict logos, brands, trademarks, certain products, buildings, events or celebrities come with an Editorial Use License.
That’s because the objects or persons in the picture are either protected by copyright of the respective company (e.g. a logo or a product) or by public authorities law (e.g. a building or a celebrity).
You cannot use editorial images for commercial purposes or in any form of advertising. You can only use them to illustrate news-related materials in all kinds of media, and in some special cases, documentaries or educational books.
Also, if you want to sell an image that shows a person and you don’t have any Model Release for that person, you can sell your image only under the Editorial Use License.
I hope I was able to bring some clarity into the mingle-mangle hodgepodge of image license types and help you decide which image license is best for you. Leave me a comment and let me know if you found this article helpful. And if so, why not share it? See you on the next post, Angie 😘
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