Carverpoint home

Using photos you did not take on your website

When it breaks 6 min read

Where the photograph on your homepage probably came from, what happens when its owner finds it, and what to do the day a letter about it arrives.

There is a photograph of a finished kitchen at the top of your homepage. You did not take it. You are not certain the person you paid took it either, and you have never had a reason to wonder about it until now. Then an email arrives with the image attached, a license number you have never seen, and a request for money.

Where the picture on your site probably came from

Somebody built your site, needed a photograph, and needed it that afternoon. There were four places to get one, and only two of them were safe.

They may have bought a license from a stock library, in which case there is a receipt somewhere. They may have used a free stock site, which is usually fine but has terms of its own. They may have taken it off Google Images. Or they may have taken it from another company's website, sometimes a competitor's, because it showed exactly the work being described.

The last two happen constantly, they happen on cheap sites and expensive ones, and they happen without the owner of the business ever being told. This is not something you failed to check. Nobody told you there was anything to check.

Google Images is not a photo library

This is the misunderstanding underneath most of it. Google Images looks like a collection of pictures you can take. It is a search of pictures sitting on other people's websites, every one of them still owned by whoever made it.

Downloading one and putting it on a business site is publishing somebody else's work to sell your services with. The photographer's rights are not affected by how easy it was to find, whether there was a watermark, or whether the picture appeared in twenty other places first.

Free, royalty free and licensed are three different things

Royalty free does not mean free. It means you pay once and do not pay again per use. Those images cost money and come with a license tied to whoever bought it.

Free stock sites are genuinely free, and most allow commercial use, but the terms vary and some require attribution or forbid using a recognizable person in a way that implies endorsement. Read the license once and save a copy of it.

Licensed means somebody bought the right to use it, and that right belongs to the buyer. A license a previous designer purchased under their own account was very likely never transferred to you, which is a live problem even when the picture was paid for honestly.

The letter, and why taking it down does not end it

The letters are usually generated. Image owners and agencies run software that crawls the web looking for their pictures, matches yours, and produces a demand with a screenshot and a date.

Removing the image is the right first move and it does not settle anything on its own, because the claim is about the period it was up, not about today. Ignoring the email does not work either, since the next one comes from somebody whose job is escalation.

What to do, in order: take the image down, and every copy of it, including the version sitting in your gallery and the one used as a social post. Screenshot what you removed and note the date. Search your own site for anything else from the same source. Then look for evidence of where it came from, which usually means asking whoever built the site for the license or the receipt.

Do not send money the same day, and do not reply admitting anything about how it got there before you know. If the amount is serious, this is worth an hour of a lawyer's time, and that hour costs money and is still cheaper than guessing.

The photographs that are risky for other reasons

A customer's house, recognizable and named, needs their say-so, and so does anything showing a face. Children are their own category, and the answer is simply not to publish them without written permission from a parent.

A competitor's finished job is the worst version, because it is a copyright problem and a false claim about your own work at the same time. Somebody eventually recognizes their own extension.

A manufacturer's product photograph usually requires permission, though many suppliers grant it to dealers, and asking takes one email. The same goes for association and certification logos, which come with rules about who may display them.

Who is at fault, and who gets the letter

The letter comes to you, because the site is in your name. That is a hard thing to read when you did not choose the picture and were never shown a license.

Most small website contracts say the person who supplied the material warrants they had the right to use it. If your designer is still answering the phone, that conversation is worth having, and a reasonable one will sort it out. If the designer stopped answering some time ago, you are in the situation described in what to do when your web designer disappears, and the practical answer is to remove the image yourself and stop the clock.

Either way, ask for the licenses for every image on the site next time somebody builds you one, and keep them in the same folder as the domain login.

What to use instead, which is already in your pocket

A phone camera in daylight beats a stock photograph on a local business site, because the stock photograph is doing an actively bad job. It shows a kitchen you did not fit, tools you do not own, and a smiling man in clean overalls that nobody believes is you.

Six honest pictures of your own work will outperform it, and there is more on making those look decent in photographs for a local business. They also carry no risk, because you took them.

A short audit of your own site

Questions people ask

I found the photo on Google, is that not allowed

Google Images is a search of pictures on other people's sites, not a library of free ones. Finding a picture easily has no bearing on who owns it.

The photo has no watermark or credit, does that mean it is free

No. Copyright exists whether or not anybody labeled the file, and plenty of image agencies deliberately circulate unmarked versions.

My web designer put the images there, am I still responsible

The demand will arrive at your door because the site carries your name, so deal with the image immediately. Whether the designer owes you something afterwards depends on what you agreed, and that is a separate conversation.

Can I use a photo of a job I did on a customer's house

Take the pictures with the owner's agreement and avoid identifying details like a house number or a car plate. Most customers say yes when asked on the day, and almost nobody says yes to a request two years later.

What about photos from the manufacturer of the products I fit

Many suppliers allow dealers to use their images and some have a folder ready for it. One email to your rep settles it and gives you something in writing.

Is a free stock photo site actually safe

Generally yes for the well-known ones, provided you read the license and save a copy. Photographs of your own work are still the better answer for a local trade.

Read next