About The Rights Desk

The Rights Desk explains picture licensing for people who buy images in the United Kingdom. You will find guidance on rights-managed versus royalty-free licences, on model and property releases, on editorial versus commercial use, on orphan works, on AI-generated images and provenance, and on what a picture research brief should contain. The site is a reference. It does not sell images and does not act as a stock agency.

How you can use the sections

You can start with Licensing Basics if you buy images for reports, articles, course materials, or marketing pages and you need to understand what a licence permits. You can use Releases and Reuse if you work with portraits, private locations, brands, or archive images and you need to check whether you need written permission for reuse. You can use Finding and Provenance if you need to trace an image to its origin, to read credit lines and metadata, or to document your checks before publication.

How the articles are written

The editorial team of The Rights Desk writes each article from publicly available information cited in the article. You will find the reference list at the end of each article, so you can read the same licence terms, guidance notes, and legal documents and form your own view. The editorial team of The Rights Desk describes organisations in the third person and remains independent of suppliers, platforms, and collecting bodies. Any limits are stated in the article. These limitations include cases where rules differ by use, where a document is not available, or where you need legal advice for your case.

Who the site is for

The site is for picture buyers, small publishers, designers, and marketing teams who handle images as part of their job. You may commission photography, select stock, or reuse archive images. The articles address you directly and focus on the tasks you carry out: defining the use, selecting the licence, requesting a release, recording provenance, and keeping files for later checks. If you need to contact the editors, you can write to [email protected].