Model And Property Release Of Stock Images
What is a model release? And what about a property release?
In order to protect a person’s privacy, you are not allowed to use images or videos of people for commercial purposes without that person’s permission.
For instance, if you took a picture of a person on the street and used that image on your website to sell a product (and this person didn’t know about this), you would be breaking privacy laws.
Only if that person gave you permission (ideally in writing) would you be allowed to use the image commercially.
The same principle applies to properties:
The owner of a property (a house, a car, a factory, a business, an object of art, trademark, design, etc.) will have to grant permission in order for you to use an image of that property in a commercial manner.
The good news?
Most of the images you find on the stock image websites reviewed on Topimagesites, already have model and property releases in place.
This will normally be clearly labeled next to the image when you look at it on the stock image website.
This means you can use the image for commercial purposes freely.
If the image doesn’t have a model or property release, this will be normally be labeled clearly as well.
If an image doesn’t have a release, but you still want to use the image commercially, you can contact the copyright holder to inquire.
All this said, you can still use images that do not have model or property releases.
As long as they are not used for commercial purposes.
This use is called editorial use. To learn more about editorial use, please go here.