One of the most frequently asked questions by both clients and professional wedding photographers is “Who owns the copyright to my wedding photos?”
This is a great question because as we approach the digital age of wedding photography, the ability to effortlessly copy, share, and print wedding photographs has led to a situation where people want to be clear about what they can do. and what they can’t. do with your photos.
To answer the question “Who owns the copyright of my wedding photos?”, Very simply, the copyright of the wedding photos belongs to the wedding photographer. As the copyright owner, of course, you can choose to sell or transfer the copyright to someone else. However, this would be most unusual and indeed most reckless, as it would mean that the photographer would no longer have any rights to use the images. So for example, they couldn’t use them for their website to promote their business or even keep them on disk in a drawer.
Transferring the copyright would also mean that the new copyright owner could charge for the use of the images, for example by selling them to the wedding venue or the florist. In fact, if the photographer who took the images in the first place wanted to use them, they could even upload them too!
So what rights do you have over your wedding photos?
What is more common today is that the wedding photographer gives the couple a DVD of their photos together with a license to use the images that allows them to print and use them for their personal use.
In terms of social media and online photo sharing, the photographer will normally stipulate within the license that the images are not full resolution and must bear a watermark that credits the original photographer. In fact, some forward thinking wedding photographers are even providing a separate set of images that are already optimized in this way and can then be instantly used by the happy couple to share the occasion on Facebook with their friends and family.
Hopefully, this short article has helped clarify the position regarding copyright ownership and wedding photos. Having said that, we still see many professional photographers advertising their services with the words “fully copyrighted”. Are they really serious? We don’t think so, but it’s a question worth asking yourself when hiring a wedding photographer so that everyone is clear about your position right from the start.
