What You Can Actually Do With Your Photographs

This comes up when a business wants to use images somewhere new and finds out the arrangement did not cover it. It is worth settling before the shoot rather than after.

Copyright and licence

Under normal arrangements the photographer holds copyright in the images and the client receives a licence to use them. The scope of that licence is what matters in practice, and it should be written down.

What to establish

• **Where** the images can be used — website, social, print, advertising, third-party platforms.
• **For how long**, if there is a limit.
• **Whether they can be edited or cropped** by the client.
• **Whether they can be given to a third party**, such as a distributor or a franchise group.
• **Whether the photographer can use them** in their own portfolio and marketing.
• **What happens if the business is sold** or rebrands.

For a small local business

A broad, perpetual licence for the business's own marketing is generally the sensible arrangement, and it is what we provide by default. The complications arise with advertising placement, third-party resale and anything involving somebody else's brand.

Files and formats

1. 1.High-resolution files for print.
2. 2.Web-sized versions, because a print file uploaded to a website slows it down badly.
3. 3.Correct colour space for the intended use.
4. 4.Sensible file naming, so the images can be found in a year.
5. 5.Your own backup, because a photographer's archive is not a substitute for one.

Raw files

Clients occasionally ask for raw files. We generally do not deliver them, for the same reason a designer does not hand over unfinished layouts — the edit is the work, and an unedited file is not a deliverable. Where a client genuinely needs them, that is a conversation to have beforehand.

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