Section
Rights and licensing
What a licence permits, when a release is required, how pictures are resold — and why an archive with poor captions cannot be licensed at all.
Rights are the part of picture work that looks like paperwork until it is wrong. A licence that does not cover the territory, a release that was never obtained, an archive whose captions are too thin to prove provenance — each turns an asset into a liability.
Here we set out what a licence actually permits, where model and property releases are needed, how orphan works are handled in the United Kingdom, and why the licensing value of an archive is set by the quality of its metadata rather than the quality of its pictures.
- New
Brand asset management, explained
Brand asset management is what happens when an organisation decides that the wrong version of its own logo appearing in public is a problem worth solving…
29 September 2026
- New
Rights-managed, royalty-free and editorial-only: what you are buying
Licensing a photograph buys a defined scope of permission. It does not buy the copyright, and it does not buy the picture.
29 September 2026
- New
Model and property releases: when you actually need one
A release is permission from a person to use their likeness, or from an owner to use their property, in a particular kind of publication. It is not…
29 September 2026
- New
Orphan works: publishing a photograph when nobody knows who took it
Every archive holds them. A print in a folder with no credit. A scan inherited from a title that closed. A negative in a box labelled with an event and…
29 September 2026
- New
How photo syndication works
Syndication is the arrangement by which a photograph taken for one publication appears in another. It is how a frame shot in the morning is on three…
29 September 2026
- Archive 2005
Picture agencies: hundreds of images in, and a waiting world
Distributing event images quickly enough to be worth anything.
- Archive 2005
Brand and rights management: one message across many channels
Presenting a consistent image when the number of media channels keeps growing.
- Archive 2005
LiveLink: a simple solution for a complex business
Getting event images from the agency to the buyer while they are still news.
- Archive 2005
Mirror Syndication International opens its image library on the web
The syndication arm of a national newspaper group, and a century of photographs.
Archive index
A census of this site: how much sits in each section, how much of it is reproduced 2005 archive and how much was written for the relaunch.
| Section | All | Archive | New |
|---|---|---|---|
| Picture desk | 8 | 3 | 5 |
| Asset management | 10 | 5 | 5 |
| Rights & licensing | 9 | 4 | 5 |
| Archives | 8 | 4 | 4 |
| Workflow | 11 | 8 | 3 |
| Case studies | 13 | 13 | 0 |
| News | 11 | 11 | 0 |
| Total | 70 | 48 | 22 |