Thaipusam Festival

Sooner or later, the emerging photographer is going to get asked about licensing their work. That may be via a magazine editor finding you through a Google search, or it may be you choosing to begin marketing your work through one of the various stock photography agencies. One of the key factors you’ll need to consider is under what license model you want your work to fall under. There are essentially two main licensing models that you need to consider, these being known as Rights-Managed (RM) and Royalty-Free (RF).

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Rights-Managed (RM)

Rights-managed is usually thought of as the “traditional” method of licensing photography. The license fee for the image is determined by factors such as type of use, size, number of displays/impressions, time, geographic region or area. Images licensed in this way offer more protection and control to the photographer. For usage outside the initially negotiated terms, the photograph must be re-licensed to meet the extra terms of use. RM is the only licensing model available to photographs that do not have model or property releases attached to them. Images lacking these releases cannot be used in some areas (such as advertising) and rights-managed allows these restrictions to be assigned to the image. Clients are also able to license the photo exclusively, meaning that the photographer cannot license it elsewhere during the time specified. This of course means a higher licensing fee per image.

Royalty-Free (RF)

Royalty-free essentially means that the person who licenses the image only has to pay a single one-time fee. Once they’ve done this, the image is theirs to use as many times as they desire in a range of different ways, although there may still be a few limitations on use. The license fee is usually based on the pixel-size of the image; the larger the image, the higher the fee. RF images are priced lower than RM and buyers may often buy RF in bulk. The looser restrictions mean that designers can often manipulate them as necessary to fit their needs. The microstock model of licensing uses all RF photographs.

Which Is Right For Me?

If you’re just starting out, I’d recommend that you begin with RM images, at least until you have a greater understanding of the intricacies of the market and the details of the various licensing models. Why RM first? Well, you can always later decide to change a RM image to RF (assuming it hasn’t been exclusively licensed etc), but once you start selling images as RF, you cannot change them to RM. A potential client is not going to be impressed if she acquires an image with exclusive rights for a high RM fee only to find that you had previously offered it as RF and it’s already been used by other end-users. If you use more than one agency to license your images, ensure that the same license model is used for all of them.

Should you decide to offer some images as RM and others as RF, a good rule of thumb is to make the strong, unique photographs rights-managed and the more generic, common ones can be given a royalty-free license. Personally, I only ever use the RM model for my photographs.

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