Skip to content
The Rights DeskPicture licensing, explained

The Rights Desk explains picture licensing for UK buyers, from rights-managed and royalty-free deals to releases, orphan works and AI image provenance.

The Rights Desk

Legal Notice

A picture editor at a desk by a tall window, reviewing prints for licensing checks.
The desk reviews prints before reading the licence, a habit this reference keeps on every shelf.

The editorial team of The Rights Desk publishes this site. You can contact the editors at contact@imagesources.org.

Hosting and data

Cloudflare provides hosting for the site. The site collects no personal data and uses no cookies or tracking. When you send an email, you share only what you write in the message, and the editorial team of The Rights Desk uses it only to handle your request.

Sources and images

Each article is based on public sources named in the article. The articles note these limits where licence terms, release forms, or provenance records vary by use or are unavailable. Photographs on the site are illustrations produced for the site and do not show the licensing cases described in the articles. If you reuse an image, you remain responsible for checking the licence, the releases, and provenance before publication. You can refer to the list of public sources in each article to carry out your own checks.