What is a stock image?

Bought once, used many times

Stock libraries exist because most businesses cannot send a photographer to every job. A photographer or illustrator uploads work to an agency or a free library, the library sets the terms, and anyone who accepts those terms can use the file without a commission. The same image of a dining room or a smiling receptionist can therefore appear in thousands of places at once, which is both the appeal and the weakness of stock. Libraries range from paid agencies with legal guarantees and model releases to free libraries run on a simple licence. What they share is that copyright stays with the creator or the library, and the buyer gets permission rather than ownership.

Royalty free, rights managed and free licences

Royalty free does not mean free. It means one payment covers repeated use within the licence, and Getty Images describes its royalty free rights as perpetual, worldwide and unlimited in the number of uses. iStock's standard licence lets the file be used for personal, business or commercial purposes across advertising, websites, social media and print, while an extended licence is needed for 500,000 or more printed copies, for products made to resell such as posters or mugs, and for extra team seats. Every iStock licence carries a USD 10,000 legal guarantee that can be raised to USD 250,000. Rights managed is the older model, where the price depends on the exact use, size, territory and period, and anything outside those terms needs a new licence; it has become less common as agencies moved toward royalty free. Free licences sit at the other end. The Unsplash License allows commercial use without permission, and a CC0 dedication waives copyright entirely where the law allows.

When the licence decides the job

Licence limits bite at predictable moments. A logo or trade mark usually cannot use stock, because the brand needs exclusivity that a shared image can never give, and iStock's terms rule it out. A poster, calendar or t shirt made for sale can need an extended licence. A very large letterbox campaign can pass a print copy threshold. Editorial images, the ones showing recognisable events, brands or people without releases, cannot promote a product at all. Getty Images' licence agreement is explicit on both points: content may not be the distinctive feature of a trade mark, business name or logo, and content marked editorial may not be used for commercial, promotional or advertising purposes unless an invoice or licence says otherwise. It also asks for a note that the picture is illustrative and the person is a model whenever a model appears beside an unflattering or controversial subject. Free images carry their own boundaries: Unsplash forbids selling an image without significant modification, and CC0 does not waive the privacy or publicity rights of a person shown in the picture.

Common mistakes

Copying a picture from a search engine results page is the classic one, because the image has an owner even when no licence page is visible. Assuming that free means unconditional is next. Using a stock photo as though it shows the real shop, the real team or the real product can mislead customers, even when the licence allows it. Picking the first result for a common search means competitors may run the same picture. And not keeping a record of where each image came from makes answering a licence query months later much harder than it needs to be. A simple note of the file name, the source page and the licence date is enough.

Stock photos in the flyer builder

A stock photo goes into a flyer the same way as any other picture: upload a JPEG, PNG, WebP or GIF up to 10 MB into an image slot, after the flyer has been saved once. Slots fill with cover fit, so the picture is centre cropped to the slot and cannot be repositioned, which favours images with the subject in the middle. When the AI generation job cannot produce an image, it falls back to an Unsplash stock search before leaving the placeholder; the builder's own generate button has no such fallback and reports a failure instead. On slides, a stock fallback stores the photographer's name and the Unsplash page URL alongside the picture.

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