It’s always worth livening up a newsletter or website with images, but how do you do it without spending a fortune? Ben Pitt explores the options
Images are an integral part of virtually every online and printed document you see. They draw the reader in, giving an instant understanding of what the accompanying text is about. They also make documents more attractive than if they were just a sea of text.
Images can be expensive to create, though. Professional photographers and illustrators require wages in line with their skills and experience, not to mention the time involved and the equipment costs. If you need to pay people to appear in photos, it can get even more expensive. That’s fine for professional projects with big budgets, but there are lots of web and printed publications that don’t have much cash to spend. In many cases the text is written and edited by hobbyists and volunteers, and there’s literally no budget for the entire project because it generates no income.
The objective of this article isn’t to do photographers and illustrators out of a living. However, if hiring a professional isn’t an option, it doesn’t necessarily mean your publication must be devoid of graphics.
THE CREATOR AND THE SUBJECT
The first thing to note is that any artwork is legally owned by the person who made it. For photos, that means the photographer. As such, you must get permission from the photographer - or the agency that represents him or her - in order to reproduce the photo for any purpose.
That’s only half the story, though, as the subject of a photo also has some rights. Regardless of whether you took the photo, your friend took it or you obtained it legitimately from a third party, you need to think about the rights of the subject matter.
One relatively simple example is if you took a photo of an existing photo that’s hanging in a gallery. You’re not suddenly free to sell it in your own gallery. The same goes for paintings, sculptures, film and video: the copyright of the original creator is still intact if the subject matter is recognisable.
A photograph of a person is a different matter, but it depends entirely on the context. For example, George Clooney advertises Nespresso coffee, and no doubt he’s paid handsomely for it. A rival coffee brand couldn’t just hire a photographer to get some snaps of George to use in its own commercial. In fact, it couldn’t even use his name or an impersonation of his voice. However, if George happened to be sitting next to you in a cafe drinking a rival brand of coffee, you could take a photo of him and post it on your blog, or even sell it to a newspaper if you felt so inclined.
The law around this is complex, not least because it varies from country to country. However, the basic principles are largely the same across most territories.
You need someone’s permission to use their likeness in any commercial setting where it’s implied that they endorse the product or service you’re selling. Similarly, you need permission to use someone’s likeness to create a product, such as a One Direction calendar. Their likeness isn’t just their faces - it might be their name, voice or any other distinguishing feature. A house or a commercial property can also count, if there’s a recognisable association to a person or company.
However, the commercial use rule doesn’t apply to advertisements that appear elsewhere in a publication. You might have a photo of the mayor opening the new swimming pool on your local news website, and on the same page there’s an advert for a dry cleaner. There’s no suggestion here that the mayor has endorsed this dry cleaner, so you’re on pretty safe ground.
Another issue is the right to privacy. The law around this is constantly evolving, but in general it’s prudent not to use photographs of people taken without their permission on private property. Similarly, if someone is in a public place but doing something that they may deem to be of a sensitive private nature - perhaps attending a weight-loss club or leaving a strip club - you could end up in hot water by publishing a photo of them.
However, this partly depends on the issue of public interest. If you snap your MP leaving a strip club, you could argue, depending on the (VIP's policies, that it’s in the public interest to publish the photo. However, if it’s just your neighbour, he could sue on the basis that it’s an invasion of privacy and there’s no public interest in whether he’s a lap dancing fan.
Then there’s the issue of misrepresentation. If you’re writing an article about flower arranging or Satanism, it’s not a good idea to include a photo of your neighbour alongside unless you know for a fact they participate in that particular interest. The image must be relevant to the article, and not suggest an untruth about the person depicted.
FACE FACTS
Ultimately, though, people do not own the copyright to their own face. If a photograph of a person doesn’t appear to promote something you’re selling, doesn't give a false impression of them and doesn’t invade their privacy (without a public interest angle), then you probably don’t need their permission to publish the photo.
For example, if you take photos at a concert, it’s not only impractical but also unnecessary to get permission from the audience members that happen to appear in the photos. The same goes for the band on stage, too. They may not allow you to take the photos in the first place, and they could simply have you removed from the building. However, once the photos have been taken, it’s unlikely that you’ll face a successful lawsuit for publishing those photos unless it’s a commercial setting such as part of a paid review of the concert.
‘Unlikely‘ is the key word here. We’re not lawyers and, even if we were, we wouldn’t be in a position to dish out blanket advice with cast-iron guarantees. Whenever it’s practical to do so, it’s best to get consent before publishing any photo of someone. If nothing else, it’s good manners, and regardless of the law, it could avoid a lot of strife. It’s particularly true for photos of children. Under-18s can’t give their own consent, so this must come from parents.
For casual use it may be sufficient to obtain permission verbally. That should avoid putting anyone’s nose out of joint. However, you’re on safer ground if you get people to sign what’s known as a model release form. This is essential if you want to use a photo in certain circumstances - as part of an advertisement, for example.
A quick online search for 'UK model release form’ brings up lots of templates you can use. These are usually written either for adults or for children. The wording typically gives the photographer permission to use any photo of the person in question for any purpose forever. That might be deemed a bit one-sided, so you might have more luck getting people to sign if it specifies the intended use, or for a specific photo shoot.
In some situations it may be necessary to obtain a property release form. The property in question might be a building, but it could be anything that belongs to another person. In most instances this isn’t necessary, but if there’s any doubt it’s best to get express permission. For example, if you were to use a recognisable exterior shot of someone’s house in an advert for your double-glazing business, it’s best to err on the side of caution and get written consent.
TAKE STOCK
All the examples above assume that you or an acquaintance has taken a photo and you simply need permission to publish it. Sometimes the challenge is to find a suitable image in the first place. It’s often impractical to take a photo especially for a given task, so what you really need is an off-the-shelf selection of images to choose from.
You may already own something suitable. Most vector-drawing software comes with a clip-art library, often running to tens of thousands of images. This might be the quickest and easiest place to start looking, although in our experience it’s rarely the best.
The library that comes with CorelDraw X7, for example, is well stocked with images of animals, household objects, sports and a few generic photos you might use to illustrate a business brochure or website. Many of these are simple vector illustrations that would work reasonably well in a school newsletter but might look out of place on a website or marketing brochure. The library isn’t massive, either - searches such as ‘baking1, ‘theatre’ and ‘camping’ generate very few matches. The highest-quality results are reserved for Corel Premium members, who pay £95 inc VAT per year for the privilege.
Fortunately, there are plenty of other online resources. Fotolia (en.fotolia.com) is a relative newcomer but it already has almost 34 million images on its books. The quality and variety is in a completely different league to CorelDraw’s library, with photos to choose for even relatively obscure searches such as 'Margate seafront’ and ‘skateboard gran’. There are illustrations and video content too, and searches can be filtered by category, colour, orientation, price, resolution and whether or not the media contains people.
Pricing is either pay-as-you-go or subscription. For the former, you buy credits for about £1 each, although but buying pushes the cost down. Prices vary greatly, according to various price categories and also the size you need. For example, a half-megapixel image suitable for a web news story could cost between two and 50 credits. The full-resolution version would cost from five to 600 credits. Thankfully, most of the content is towards the lower end of these price scales, and filtering out the pricier stuff avoids frustration.
Subscription packages always exclude the priciest Infinite Collection images, and cost from £16 per month for five full-size or ten 2-megapixel images. Prices come right down for high-volume use. You can cancel at any time, and unused credits roll over to the next month as long as the subscription is active.
There are lots of other professional image libraries: iStock by Getty Images, Shutterstock, Alamy, Corbis. Search for ‘stock photo’ and you’ll find dozens more. The better-known brands generally charge premium prices. iStock starts at £7 for a single credit, falling to about £5 when buying in bulk. Photos from the Essentials range cost one credit, while Signature images are three credits. Subscriptions start at £100 per month, with a year’s minimum subscription.
One great thing about these stock image libraries is that your rights to the photo and its subject are clearly defined. The libraries will invariably require that model and property release forms have been signed for anyone and anything that might require it. Your licence to use the photo will normally be for any purpose forever.
There are exceptions, though. You can’t use an image to create your own stock image library, for example. Neither can you give or sell the image to other people - you’ve only bought the licence to use the image, not the image itself. In most cases you can’t resell the image as part of a new product such as a poster, T-shirt or mug. Fotolia allows this, but only with an extended licence that costs up to 10 times as much as the standard license.
FREE AND EASY
In most cases, though, the prices of professional stock image libraries are far from extortionate. Fotolia’s cheapest subscription package works out at £1.20 per image. Even iStock’s highest one-off price of £20 for a single image is reasonable if it’s something that you’ll get a lot of use from. However, if you regularly need images to accompany blog posts, or perhaps if you’re producing something as a favour and don’t want to be spending your own money, you may need to find images that are free to use.
Public domain images are where the copyright has either lapsed or has been wholly or partially waived by its owner. Various websites act as librarians for these images, such as www.public-domain-photos.com, www.publicdomainpictures.net and www.imageafter.com. One of our favourites is www.freeimages.com. It used to go by the name stock.xchng, but it has recently had a name change after being bought by Getty Images. The top search results are now paid-for content from www.istockphoto.com, but scroll down a little and the free content is still available. Hopefully it will stay that way.
Public domain sites’ search facilities aren’t as sophisticated as those of the commercial libraries and the content isn’t as consistent, but there’s a decent volume so it’s usually possible to find something suitable. However, it’s important to check what the restrictions are. The standard licence prohibits reselling and including in a trademark. It also forbids use of an image to endorse products and services if it depicts a person. That’s because the photographer has donated the photo, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that the model has given up his or her rights.
Overall, though, our favourite source of free photos is Flickr. The entire site is free to browse, of course, but some Flickr users have also granted people permission to reproduce their photos. This process is managed using Creative Commons licenses, which provide a simple, easily identifiable way to give up some but not all rights over creative works.
All licences on Flickr require the photographer to be credited. This credit should include the photo's title and author, as well as links to the Flickr source page and the Creative Commons licence. The best practices for doing so are explained at tinyurl.com/ccbestpractice. Some images on Flickr can be licensed for noncommercial purposes only. Some stipulate No Derivative Works, which means you can republish a photo but only if it’s a verbatim copy. You can resize it but not alter colours or add or remove things from the photo.
Regarding what constitutes a derivative work: the advice at wiki.creativecommons.org as to exactly where the line is drawn is unclear. It appears to vary according to the laws of the territory you or the photographer inhabit, but that’s not much help in practice. The crux is whether you have created a new work from the original. We’d feel fairly relaxed about moderately cropping and including some text, as that doesn’t substantially change the image.
Some images on Flickr are marked as Share Alike, which means that derivative works must be shared using the same licence as the original image. Just visit www.flickr.com/creativecommons and creativecommons.org for more information on Creative Commons licences.
To find the images, simply head to www. flickr.com, perform a text search, hit the Advanced Search button and tick the box marked Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content. If necessary, also tick the boxes for commercial use and adaptations. Because Flickr is primarily used by hobbyist photographers, the images tend to have more of a documentary or artistic feel than the staged appearance of many stock images. Bear in mind once again that these photos probably won’t have model and property release forms attached to them. Just because the photographer has given consent for commercial use, it doesn’t mean the models have. However, the lack of release forms shouldn’t be a problem for non-commercial use where photos are taken in a public setting.
The final resource we’ll mention is 500px.com. It’s similar to Flickr in that it provides an online showcase of its users’ photos. However, we find that its smaller user base is a particularly arty lot. These are the kinds of pictures that might look at home hanging on the wall rather than accompanying a blog post. 500px users can choose to sell their photos via the site, in some cases as wall art, but also via its Prime service (prime.500px.com) for licensing.
Some are marked for editorial use only, which usually means there’s no associated model release for commercial use, but most don’t have this limitation. $250 (about £160) per image for unrestricted use will be out of most people’s budgets, but $50 (about £32) for a 1-megapixel copy for web use is more realistic. That might be worth paying for a photo with a high artistic value that could appear across the top of a homepage.