Break the Feast-or-Famine Cycle with Third-Party Licensing

Guest Post by Natalia Robert

As a photographer, you undoubtedly have a large library of photos on your computer, taking up space and collecting digital dust. But are you making the most of all your hard work? Photos that you’ve taken and have retained copyright for are all able to be licensed to different parties, often referred to as “third party licensing” because you are licensing to others outside your original client’s business. Image licensing can be a healthy revenue stream for your business as a photographer, so let’s break down how to get started with third party licensing of your photos. 

*For the sake of this article, we’re talking about photos that you’ve taken and have retained copyright for. We are also working under the assumption that you have all releases needed to license the images at your will. If you’re not sure about the ownership of images you’ve taken, reference your contract with that client or a copyright lawyer.

Why License Your Photos

First, let’s look at why you should even bother licensing photos to different parties. After all, your client hires you to capture a project for them, you complete the shoot, deliver final images, and the job is done. Right? Yes, but those photos could keep working for you. 

Third party licensing can be a lucrative income stream for your business, and licensing is indeed a large part of most successful artists’ revenue. Since you can license images that you’ve taken at any point in time, this means you can license those photos from a project three years ago without having to reshoot anything or even redo the editing. This makes licensing ideal for adding to your workflow in between photoshoots, helping to ease the “feast-or-famine” cycle that we’ve all felt before!

Finally, I’ve come to see third party licensing as a tool to help enforce my copyright and the licensing boundaries set with my original client. By reaching out to brands and offering photos for licensing, having conversations with them to explain your usage limitations, and giving everyone a way to use the images through appropriate licenses, you’re helping to protect your images a bit more from potential copyright infringement. 

Organize Your Portfolio

Now that you’ve decided you want to incorporate third party licensing into your business, it’s time to organize your information. This is absolutely the most time-consuming part of the process, especially when you’re gathering photos from the past! We’ll touch on some tips for working this into your process for future shoots, but first let’s cover what to do when you want to leverage those older images.

One big thing to keep in mind is that your outreach will be more successful if you have a variety of photos to offer a brand. For example, if I have two photos from a shoot that show a Wolf range, then I’m betting on those two photos being so enticing that the brand will want to license them. However, if I show a gallery with 15 photos from a mix of shoots, all showing Wolf appliances, then my chances of some photos getting licensed just went up significantly. 

When you first look at past shoots, I recommend starting with shoots that were for clients who like to do a lot of tagging on Instagram. For interior designers, this often means they’ll be tagging all the brand accounts from different products in the photo. For example, there could be a photo of a kitchen, and the designer has tagged the refrigerator brand, the flooring company, the tile manufacturer, the faucet brand, and the light fixture brand. These are all brands that you know you can approach to offer images for their use. 

You can also look at projects done for clients with whom you have a close relationship. In those cases, you may be able to ask them directly for some brand names. I recommend making the request via email and giving them a simple list of what brands you’re looking for. Make it as easy and quick for them to send you the information as possible.  Once you’ve got some brands identified in some past shoots, it’s time to organize all that information! I recommend creating a simple spreadsheet where you can put the project information, the specific photo that you’re referencing, the item in the photo that’s identified, the brand connected to it, and the contact information for that brand. Here’s a screenshot of the spreadsheet that I created for myself for all my licensing outreach:

Moving forward, get yourself into the habit of looking at brands of items in projects you’re photographing. Often there’s a brand mark or tag that can be found – for appliances you’ll see them on the front panel, for cabinets there’s often some marking or name inside the boxes, faucets will often have a brand on their base. During the shoot is also a great time to ask your client what brand something is. A simple “This fixture is gorgeous. What brand is it?” will suffice. Be sure to take notes so you don’t forget! I like to use the Notes app in my phone.

Do Your Research

Now that you’ve organized all your information and have a beautiful spreadsheet, it’s time to put some contacts in there! 

Generally, you’ll be looking to connect with people in the marketing department of whatever brand or manufacturer you’re reaching out to. If it’s a small local business, though, you may directly seek out the owner/founder. A great place to start is LinkedIn. Most brands and manufacturers will have employees on LinkedIn, and a quick search can often give you a great list to start with. You need email addresses, though, so that’s where some handy tools come in. 

Skrapp is a browser extension that I’ve been using for years. It’s free up to a certain number of contacts (I’ve never reached the limit!), and it tells you the email address associated with a LinkedIn profile. So,while you’re on someone’s profile, you click the icon for this extension and it’ll pop up a small window with the information. Often, this works perfectly. Sometimes, though, it’s not able to provide the address. 

This is when I go to Rocket Reach. While Rocket Reach is a paid service, you can do a limited number of searches for free. You do need to create a free account, but I’ve had great success finding contact information here. Rocket Reach can also be used to “guess” someone’s email because they will often have the different extensions for the target company. For example, if I’m trying to reach someone at ABC Countertops, I may not find the exact person I need but I can search for that company and find that all employee emails have the pattern and then, I can deduce the address for my ideal person in that company!

Once you have the contact information you need, be sure to add it to your spreadsheet. I like to put the person’s name, their position at the company, their email address, and even any notes of things that stood out about them. Sometimes small details can create an unexpected connection that turns a cold email into a warm lead.

Making Galleries

Outreach

We touched a bit on the outreach already by saying that it should be short and professional. I like to add in some personalization to start so that the person can see that you’re not copying and pasting the email to a lot of people.Then it’s time to get right down to business and make your offer. 

Here is the general template of what I send:

I would give them one week to reply. If, after one week, I hear nothing, then it’s time for a follow-up. You can choose to do what makes the most sense to you, but I choose to do two follow-ups. The first follow-up email is a week after the first one, and then the second follow-up is about 3-4 days later. 

Since this is the follow-up schedule that I use, I keep the photo gallery link active for 2 weeks unless we’re in active talks about image licensing and they need more time for consideration.

One final note on the outreach email – be mindful of which day of the week it is! Typically for any type of outreach, I avoid Mondays and Fridays. Mondays tend to be the day when people get back to the office and have a large amount of emails to work through, so you don’t want your email to get lost in that shuffle. Fridays I avoid because by then most people have their minds on the weekend, and so there’s a bigger chance they’ll put off making any sort of purchasing decision. 

Things to Keep in Mind

• Do your research on rates. This can feel like a shot in the dark, but there are some things to consider.
  • First, ask in any online communities you belong to, or to any photographers you know in person. You’ll most likely get a big range of rates that people have set, but it will give you a starting point. For architecture and interiors, rates are often in the $300-500 per photo range, although it depends on the brand and usage terms.
  • Consider the size of the brand/company when setting your rates. Not only do smaller, local companies typically have smaller budgets, but they also will typically have a smaller reach for their usage. Consider how a local cabinet maker will use the photos in their social media, website, and local or regional publications, in comparison to how an international brand would leverage images to use on marketing materials across different countries, potentially distributing to their showrooms, and on materials that have a much larger reach.
  • Consider a bundle rate. Especially for smaller companies, offering some sort of incentive when they purchase licensing for multiple images can be helpful in getting that “yes”. For example, you might set a rate of $300 per photo, but it drops to $250 per photo if they license 5 or more images.
• Don’t be afraid to embed a low resolution image in the email as a visual teaser. There has to be some base level of trust that you’re reaching out to a professional who will not use the photo in unlicensed ways. But always make sure your photos are registered with the copyright office so that if someone does grab that photo and use it without permission, you have all the power possible to pursue them for infringement!

Conclusion

Licensing your photos can be a valuable revenue stream for your business, while also letting you serve more businesses with your skills. It does take time and patience to organize the information, set up galleries, and do the outreach, but creating a workflow for this process is also a great way to balance out the roller coaster of the financial “feast or famine” cycle. With some preparation and an enthusiasm to serve, you can make it incredibly easy for brands worldwide to say “yes” to licensing your images!

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Before you license your photos, RightsClick urges you to register them with the U.S. Copyright Office–ideally before they ever leave your studio.