How to Explain Image Licensing for Real Estate and Architecture Photography - YouTube

Today I'm going to talk about the most exciting subject in all of photography... licensing.

I've studied photography since 2005 when I first started out as a professional photographer

And I have a pretty solid understanding of how licensing works and I thought you all might be interested and hearing this information

Full disclosure. I'm not an attorney. This isn't legal advice. This is really just a very

Paraphrased explanation of how I've come to understand it over the years and U.S.

Copyright law is pretty complicated. But as it relates to photography what it says is that it basically states that somebody who takes a photo that

Person is the exclusive owner of that photo immediately. They own the copyright. They have the right to reproduce and

Redistribute that photograph however, they want and they can display it

However, they want as well now to avoid copyright infringement

The way you would allow people to use your photos for commercial purposes such as a real estate listing is through licensing

Now this all gets pretty complicated and I'm going to start off by using an analogy like music

It translates pretty well

so now when you purchase a song on iTunes for $0.99

You're not buying that song. You don't own the song you're buying a license to download and use that song for personal use

When I make a video for real estate

I have to license that song each time and there's going to be a fee associated with that each time that I pay for

if you want to use an extreme example that everybody's familiar with if

You're a car company and you want to use 30 seconds of that song "Like a Rock" to sell your trucks

You have to license that

30 seconds of that song for that specific use and at that point you're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees

Basically the same principles apply to photography.

If you hire a photographer to photograph your family, for example

You're gonna pay a relatively low fee like a hundred to five hundred dollars

Depending where you're at just to be able to hang those photos in your home or share them on social media

But you wouldn't be able to take those photos and sell them to a company like Starbucks for example for an ad campaign

They'd actually need to

License those photos from the photographer. And of course the photographer would have to get your written consent

But legally the photographer owns the copyright and not the family. When it comes to real estate photography

It's very similar and it really all boils down to the amount of images and the use or distribution

And ultimately the value of those images or the potential return on investment of those images.

Now on the higher end you have commercial marketing campaigns for larger brands where the images are going to be used for

Magazines large print etc

Typically those shoots are thousands to tens of thousands of dollars depending on the photographer and the distribution in most cases you're looking at

Tens or hundreds of thousands if not millions for the return on investment of those images

Which is why there's a higher rate for

photographers and

Their shoot fee and their licensing now if we go down a notch to say a residential designer or a builder or an architect

the licensing fees associated with that are often determined by the amount of images and their use

Typically only a handful of images might be needed and it's gonna be for social media website and possibly some print ads

most designers are national

so you're likely not going to be dealing with a national campaign meaning that the

distribution and the eyeballs on that are gonna be very limited and

The licensing tends to be on a per image basis plus the shoot fee. now on average design shoot could range anywhere from a few hundred

To a few thousand dollars depending on all the variables now with these you can expect a long-term return on investment of thousands

If not tens of thousands

from new clientele.

Now we have real estate listings. These are a very limited use, they are very limited distribution and

There's a very limited amount of time spent on location and in editing for the photographer. So for real estate

the photos aren't selling the Realtor or a service or selling a home and typically the

Listing agreement only lasts for about six months to a year and then the images really aren't used again

This is why you can hire a photographer over just a couple hundred dollars you get 25 images on

for a real estate listing. With professional images you're often going to see

Thousands of dollars as a return on your investment because of your commissions. Now remember we're talking about licensing here.

I just want to remind you're not paying for the photos themselves. You're paying for the license

Meaning you wouldn't own the photos. You really can't do what you want with them

You'd have to your licensing the use of the images for the sale of that property

The images can't be given to the Builder, a designer, property management company.

They can't be sold to another agent to be used if your listing expires

All of those things would legally be considered copyright infringement

And those images would actually need to be relicensed through your photographer and there's typically a cost associated with that

it's really a standard across the industry and the main reason is because if you're using a professional

Photographers work to potentially earn thousands of dollars that photographer should be compensated for that

I hope this helped to shed just a little bit of light on this subject if you weren't already familiar with it

This isn't something we talk about often if ever and I just wanted to be sure to cover this topic as best as I could

in a short amount of time

Please let me know if you have any questions on this topic. I'll be happy to answer them. But in the meantime

Thanks so much for watching. We'll see you next week with a brand new episode