If your marketing team doesn’t have its own stock photography account by now, you should stop what you are doing and get one. I’m not talking about your agency’s account, I’m talking about one that you manage that is used by your marketing team.
I’ve personally been involved in helping clients deal with potential lawsuits for misusing images on their websites or social media. Dealing with this type of legal issue is expensive, time-consuming, and a pain to deal with.
At Solid Digital, we’ve been delivering digital marketing services for over 18 years, and it still surprises us when clients try to avoid having their own stock photography account and use ours. We have plenty of image credits, the real issue is the risk involved in getting images from an agency. You can’t be sure they’re sourcing them correctly, and you don’t ultimately own the license to the image, they do. When we put ourselves in our client’s shoes, we just can’t see an upside to not having their own account.
When you have your own image account, your team knows a consistent way to find images, all your licenses are in one place, and you can add processes around sourcing images and auditing licenses. You can also give access to your agency so that you know every image they use has a valid license that you control.
Types of Image Misuse
This list is not comprehensive, but here are the most common issues we see.
- Using Google Images: If your team uses Google Images to source images, please stop…today. Images found through this search are almost guaranteed to require a license you don’t have.
- Using Free Image Sites Improperly: A common workaround to having a stock photography account is to use a “free” image search site. Many times, free image sites use the Creative Commons License, which can have specific attribution or usage requirements that, if done improperly, result in potential infringement.
- Legacy Images: If your website has been around for a long time, do you know if previous employees, agencies, contractors, etc, all used licensed images? It can be a nightmare if you don’t have an inventory of your images and licenses in one place. I would consider doing an audit to make sure your images don’t leave you vulnerable.
- Traps set by Copyright Trolls: There are entire law firms that work with designers to search the internet for sites that use their images and shake them down. The image usually ends up on a “Free Image Site” with a Creative Commons license and very specific attribution requirements. If you don’t follow the requirements precisely, the troll farm law farm (just Google “Higbee and Associates copyright troll” ) will send you a demand letter, usually for an amount exponentially higher than the cost of an image license (I’ve seen payouts of $4,000 for a single image).
- Commercial Photography Violations: Commercial photography doesn’t involve a stock photography account, but when you hire a professional photographer, you should fully understand and follow the license agreement between the photographer and your company. Sometimes specific usage requirements are present in their contracts. Read the terms carefully, and if you plan on using the images in a way that isn’t allowed, ask them to update the agreement or pay for the correct license level.
- Misused Editorial Licenses: With any image, there are specific uses for which the asset can be used. Ensure you verify the allowed uses for the image you are using and that you are not infringing. Sometimes, you will just have to pay a higher license fee for commercial use of an image. Blog posts, social media, and websites are usually not considered commercial use. But verify your usage and the image license you plan on using.
Benefits of Having a Stock Photography Account
- It’s Cheap insurance: Many Stock Photography accounts range from $15-30 a month, and you get access to 10 images per month in many cases. That means each license is $1-3 each. That is super cheap, and it’s hard to justify the risk of such a cheap expense.
- Saves time: Searching many different sites for images can be time-consuming. Knowing that you have one place to go for images means you won’t find yourself on many websites with analysis paralysis trying to find the best photo.
- No designer required: Every marketing team should create content consistently (multiple times a month, in fact). Your team should be able to source their images and publish their content without involving a designer or an agency.
- All licenses in one place: If you have a single account that everyone uses, you know that if you have to reproduce a license for an image that’s used, you can simply go to your account and find it.
Why Relying on Your Agency’s Account is a Bad Idea
- Lack of Control: You don’t know with certainty if they sourced the images properly on their side. We source images correctly, but are you certain every agency does?
- Lack of Ownership: Are you going to work with that agency forever? If not, you should think about what happens when the relationship ends, and you want to keep yourself safe. They can’t transfer licenses to you because you didn’t pay for them. Just get your own account, and you won’t have to worry about it.
- Lack of Protection: If the agency owns the license and they go away (which happens all the time), how will you be protected if you are asked to produce a license for the image in use on your website or social media?
- Future Needs: You should be creating content on an ongoing basis and you don’t want to have to rely on an agency to publish a blog post for you. If you do hire them for content, I would still recommend you don’t use their account simply because of the other reasons I’ve mentioned above. Even if the agency creates an account they use for your company as part of their services, wouldn’t you want that account to be yours?
Starting in 2024, Solid Digital has advised our clients early in our relationship about the importance of having a Stock Photography account. In the last few years, there has been a significant increase in the number of lawsuits we have personally seen, and the risk just doesn’t seem worth it. So please take our advice and ensure you have your own stock photography account, in addition to any owned photography and other assets you might have. It can save you thousands of dollars.
