What does royalty free images mean? The photographer sells his images through an agency where the cost of an image is determined by the file size and resolution. The bigger the size and resolution, the more expensive the royalty free is.
Royalty free license is oftentimes confused with another type of image licensing which is rights managed license. With rights managed, the buyer pays a fee to a limited use of the image. the license is restricted to a specific usage of the image, such as geographic location, time or duration, form or media, and also size and placement of the content. Though rights manage does not also grant exclusivity, meaning the buyer does not have the right to use the material exclusively. The license covers limited use, so every time the image will be used in a different way, a new license is needed. Rights managed images are a bit costly than royalty free images since they are not widely available and for that, RM images are less likely to have duplicates.
There is a lot of stock photography agencies that sell royalty free images but here is a list of the best site:
- Shutterstock (shutterstock.com)
- Getty Images (gettyimages.com)
- iStock by Getty Images (istock.com)
- Fotalia by Adobe (fotalia.com)
- Adobe Stock (stock.adobe.com)
Obtaining a royalty free license does not transfer the ownership of the material nor grants exclusive rights to use the material. In case of stock photography, the photographer is the creator and the owner of the image. He owns the copyright; therefore he can resell the image to other paying customers. The buyer does not get exclusivity to the image and the photographer has no control over when, what for and until when the buyer would use the image, unless otherwise specified by the agency who licensed it.