May I use an image I found through image search?

Image search is a discovery tool, not a licence source. Being publicly accessible does not mean that use is permitted: simple photographs are protected until 50 years after their publication (§ 72 UrhG), photographic works until 70 years after the author's death (§ 64 UrhG). Without a granted usage right (§ 31 UrhG) the basis is missing, and the rights holder can demand removal, injunctive relief and damages (§ 97 UrhG). Anyone who has found a fitting motif gets furthest by contacting the author and settling the use in writing - or by recreating the motif in their own business.

Do I have to name the photographer for every image?

The right to recognition of authorship belongs to the author; they determine whether and with which designation their work is marked (§ 13 UrhG). The agreement is therefore decisive. If the photographer expressly waives the credit, it can be dropped. If the contract says nothing about it, naming the author is the safe option, and it costs little. The Federal Court of Justice has confirmed that a financial loss caused by a missing author credit may be measured as a surcharge on the notional licence fee (BGH, judgment I ZR 187/17). A correctly licensed image without a credit therefore remains an open point.

Do I need written consent for photos of my employees?

Portraits may only be distributed or publicly displayed with the consent of the person depicted (§ 22 KunstUrhG). In an employment relationship there is an addition: consent has to be given in writing or electronically unless special circumstances make another form appropriate, and the purpose and right of withdrawal have to be explained in text form (§ 26 BDSG). A verbal promise is therefore not automatically invalid, but it is hard to prove. What has proven itself is a short form naming the purposes individually - website, careers page, social media, print - instead of a blanket clause.

What happens to photos when an employee leaves the company?

There is no blanket answer; it depends on the wording of the consent and on the individual case. What is clear: consent under data protection law can be withdrawn at any time with effect for the future (Art. 7 GDPR). A fixed step in the offboarding process is therefore sensible - review the image stock, pull the occurrences from the documentation, decide together what stays and what gets replaced. Anyone who has noted the places of use per image handles this in minutes; anyone who has not searches through sub-pages, blog posts and downloads.

Does a licence from an image library also cover social media and ads?

That depends on the specific licence terms and cannot be answered in general. The scope of a usage right may be limited in territory, time and content (§ 31 UrhG); if it is not expressly regulated, the scope follows the purpose of the contract as understood by both parties (§ 31 UrhG). Common restrictions concern editorial motifs in advertising, passing the file to third parties and editing the image. Anyone with the licence scope recorded per image answers this question at the next campaign launch in seconds rather than in a search operation.

How bad is a warning letter about an image in reality?

It should be taken seriously, but it is rarely the catastrophe it is described as online. The level of damages follows the individual case: the Federal Court of Justice looks at the rights holder's actual licensing practice and regarded an order of magnitude of 100 euros as defensible for a simple photo in commercial use (BGH, judgment I ZR 187/17). At the same time the law sets formal requirements for the warning letter itself; if it does not meet them, it is ineffective (§ 97a UrhG). A sensible approach is therefore: take the image offline first, check the facts against your own documentation and have the claim assessed legally instead of signing a pre-drafted declaration unchecked.

Image Rights: How to Use Photos Safely on Your Website

A real photo of your own team, of the van parked outside a customer's house, of the finished job - in a local market that convinces people more than any phrasing. And it is exactly where the legal questions pile up: copyright, usage rights, photographer credits, the personality rights of the people shown and data protection all meet in every single picture. Because images account for 911 KB of the 2,560 KB median mobile home page (HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2025), they also carry the technical quality of the page. This article sorts the four layers that come together in every image and shows how a plain image record turns a diffuse risk into a manageable task. It is not legal advice but a working basis for businesses that take their website seriously - and for anyone planning a project with a web agency from the Hildesheim region where the images are cleared from the start.

Key takeaways

Being publicly accessible is not a licence: simple photographs are protected until 50 years after publication (§ 72 UrhG), photographic works until 70 years after the author's death (§ 64 UrhG).
What is granted is never copyright itself but usage rights, limitable by media, duration, editing and transfer (§ 31 UrhG). Without an explicit clause the contract purpose defines the scope; exceeding it triggers injunction and damages claims (§ 97 UrhG).
The photographer decides whether and how to be credited (§ 13 UrhG); if the contract is silent, a credit next to the image is the safe route. A missing credit can add a surcharge on the notional licence fee (BGH, judgment I ZR 187/17).
Identifiable people require consent (§ 22 KunstUrhG); for employees it must be written or electronic with information given in text form (§ 26 BDSG). Withdrawal takes effect going forward (Art. 7 GDPR), so the photo must also leave blog posts and downloads.
Own photos of the team, vehicles and finished work keep the usage rights inside the company; close-ups of materials and tools avoid the consent question entirely. Every meaningful image still needs an alt text describing its content and function.
One row per image file with author, source, licence scope, consent and places of use answers in minutes where a photo came from. Images are also the heaviest item on the median mobile home page at 911 KB of 2,560 KB (HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2025).

Why photos are the strongest trust signal

Someone looking for a tradesperson in Hildesheim rarely compares wording. They look at the people who will be standing in their house tomorrow, at whether the van looks cared for, and at whether the jobs shown match their own plans. Photos answer in seconds what text needs several paragraphs for: does this business really exist, does it work cleanly, is it nearby? In our projects, a business's own photos are regularly among the elements that change a page noticeably - considerably more than a new colour scheme (project experience).

Those same images are also the part of a website that is most often created without a cleared basis. A shot from an image search, a product photo from a supplier, a snapshot from the summer party, a picture from an old collaboration whose contract hardly anyone can find any more: each of them carries a question that only surfaces once somebody asks it. And unlike a typo in the text, an image rights problem does not disappear when you correct it - it reaches back over the whole period the picture was online.

The most expensive sentence in image law

"The picture was free on the internet." Being publicly accessible is not a licence. A simple photograph is protected until 50 years after its publication have passed (§ 72 UrhG); for photographic works with personal intellectual creation, copyright ends only 70 years after the author's death (§ 64 UrhG). A picture without a watermark, without a copyright notice and without any reference to the photographer is therefore not a free picture - it is a picture whose rights holder has not got in touch yet.

The good news: the number of questions is manageable. Four layers come together in every image - the copyright in the picture, the naming of the author, the rights of the people shown, and the question of whether the motif suits the business at all. Anyone who works through those four layers once and writes down the result does not have to reconstruct them at the next relaunch.

Layer 1: copyright and usage rights

Copyright itself cannot be transferred under German law. What a photographer can grant are usage rights: the author may grant another party the right to use the work for individual or all types of use, and may limit that right in terms of territory, time or content (§ 31 UrhG). A simple usage right permits use without excluding others; an exclusive usage right permits use to the exclusion of all other persons (§ 31 UrhG). In practical terms for a business: two competitors can legitimately show the same purchased motif on their home page.

The most important sentence for everyday practice sits in paragraph 5. If the contract does not expressly state which types of use the right covers, the scope is determined by the purpose of the contract as understood by both parties (§ 31 UrhG). This purpose-of-grant rule works in favour of the author: in case of doubt, whatever was not clearly granted stays with them. Anyone who commissions a shoot "for the new website" and later uses the pictures in an advertising campaign, on a vehicle and in a social media channel quickly moves beyond what was agreed.

Licence question	What needs to be settled	Typical friction point in SMEs
Reach and media	Website, social media, ads, print, vehicle lettering, trade fair stand - each type of use named separately	The shoot was meant for the website, the pictures later end up in ads
Term	Unlimited or capped in years, and what happens to already published pages once it expires	A licence quietly runs out, the pictures stay online
Editing	Cropping, colour adjustment, text on the image, montage, use as a background	A motif is cropped and overlaid with an advertising claim
Transfer to third parties	Whether an agency, association, portal or supplier may use the pictures as well	A trade association takes pictures from the company website
Exclusivity	Simple or exclusive usage right (§ 31 UrhG)	A competitor shows the same purchased motif
Credit	Whether, where and in which spelling the author is named (§ 13 UrhG)	The credit is missing or hidden away in the legal notice

A licence breach is not a formality

Anyone who exceeds the limits of a licence uses the image without a usage right to that extent. In law this is treated as an infringement: claims for removal, for injunctive relief where there is a risk of repetition, and for damages in cases of intent or negligence all apply (§ 97 UrhG). That is why the seemingly pedantic question "does the licence cover social media too?" carries practical weight - it decides whether a publication is contractual or unlawful.

Where an image comes from decides how much work the clearance will be. Six sources cover most of the everyday reality of a local business - and each brings its own typical gap.

Your own shots

If an employee takes the photo as part of their duties, the usage rights generally sit with the business. It is still worth recording it, with date and occasion. People in the picture additionally need their own clearance.

Commissioned photography

The contract is the decisive point. Media, term, editing, transfer and credit belong in writing before the appointment is booked - afterwards the negotiating position is a different one.

Image libraries

Licence terms differ considerably: some require a credit, many exclude editorial motifs from advertising use, almost all prohibit passing the file on to third parties. The licence proof and the invoice belong in the archive.

Manufacturer and supplier images

Product photos are often sent informally by email. A short written confirmation that use on your own website and in your own channels is permitted takes five minutes and saves the later reconstruction.

Photos from customers and partners

A customer sends the photo of their finished terrace. That makes them neither the author nor a party entitled to grant usage rights. The decisive follow-up question is simple: who took the picture?

Finds from the web

Image search, social networks, industry portals: here the rights holder is unknown and the use therefore unresolved. The same applies to screenshots of other people's pages and to map excerpts.

Layer 2: author credits and what a breach costs

The author has the right to recognition of authorship of the work; they may determine whether the work is to carry an author designation and which designation is to be used (§ 13 UrhG). This right stays with the photographer even where far-reaching usage rights have been granted. Whether a credit is required therefore follows from the agreement: if the author expressly waives it, the credit can be dropped; if the contract is silent, naming the author is the safe option.

Where the credit should sit is less clearly regulated than many expect. A workable order has emerged in practice: directly at the image as a caption, alternatively as a discreet overlay at the edge of the image, alternatively as a collected credit list on a clearly linked sub-page that references the individual file. The further the credit sits from the image, the easier it becomes to argue about whether it fulfils the naming requirement. A credit that appears only in the legal notice and gets mixed in with the mandatory details there is the weakest option - what actually belongs in a legal notice is described in the article on the mandatory details under § 5 DDG.

How a court measures the damage is shown by the Federal Court of Justice decision of 13 September 2018 on the sports car photo (BGH, judgment I ZR 187/17). The basis is the licence analogy: what reasonable contracting parties would have agreed as remuneration is compensated (§ 97 UrhG). The Federal Court of Justice looks at the rights holder's actual licensing practice at the time of the infringement. Where no such practice exists, customary industry rates may serve as a benchmark - whether fee recommendations drawn up unilaterally by a photo marketing association meet that standard was expressly described as questionable by the panel (BGH, judgment I ZR 187/17). For the photo of a hobby photographer used commercially on a sales platform, an amount in the order of 100 euros per image came into consideration (BGH, judgment I ZR 187/17).

The amount of the notional licence fee owed to compensate for the financial loss caused by the missing author credit may be measured as a surcharge on the licence fee payable for the respective use.

Federal Court of Justice, judgment of 13 September 2018 - I ZR 187/17

Two lessons follow. First: the amount depends on the individual case and not on a rate card - blanket horror figures from the web are as unreliable as the hope that it will not cost anything. Second: the missing credit is a separate item that is added on top of the licence fee. Anyone who acquired a licence correctly but did not name the author still has an open point.

What a warning letter has to contain

The law sets formal requirements: the warning must name the injured party if a representative issues it, describe the infringement precisely, break down the payment claims asserted into damages and reimbursement of expenses, and state whether the proposed cease-and-desist undertaking goes considerably beyond the infringement complained of. A warning that does not comply is ineffective (§ 97a UrhG). However, the cap on recoverable legal fees at an object value of 1,000 euros applies only to natural persons who do not use protected works for their commercial or self-employed professional activity (§ 97a UrhG) - it does not help a business. Even so, a warning letter is worth having reviewed rather than signing hastily.

Layer 3: people in your pictures

As soon as a person is recognisable, a second legal layer appears that is independent of copyright. Portraits may only be distributed or publicly displayed with the consent of the person depicted (§ 22 KunstUrhG). Consent is deemed given in case of doubt where the person received payment for being photographed; after death, the consent of relatives is required for ten years (§ 22 KunstUrhG). Recognisability does not require a face - build, clothing, a tattoo, the surroundings or workwear with a name badge can be enough.

The law does know exceptions, but they are narrower than everyday practice tends to assume. § 23 KunstUrhG permits distribution without consent in four cases and partly withdraws that permission again in its second paragraph.

Portraits from the sphere of contemporary history - practically irrelevant for the daily life of a local business (§ 23 KunstUrhG).
People as incidental elements alongside a landscape or other location: the shot has to keep its meaning without the person (§ 23 KunstUrhG).
Pictures of assemblies, processions and similar events in which the people shown took part - the event has to define the picture, not the individual person (§ 23 KunstUrhG).
Portraits not produced to order, provided that distribution or display serves a higher interest of art (§ 23 KunstUrhG).
The counter-exception: even in these cases the permission falls away where a legitimate interest of the person depicted is thereby infringed (§ 23 KunstUrhG).

Data protection sits alongside the Art Copyright Act. A photo in which a person is recognisable is personal data; publishing it on a website is processing and needs a legal basis. For employee, customer and event photos that is consent in practice. It has to be given freely, on an informed basis and for the specific purpose - and it can be withdrawn at any time with effect for the future (Art. 7 GDPR). For employees there is an addition: consent has to be given in writing or electronically unless special circumstances make another form appropriate, and the purpose and the right of withdrawal have to be explained in text form (§ 26 BDSG).

Employees

Team photos work, but they need consent per person and per purpose. Spell the purposes out individually: website, careers page, social media profile, print. How a careers page with real faces can be built is shown in the article on the careers page in the trades.

Customers

A finished bathroom, a renovated shop, a satisfied client in the picture: the clearance belongs in the project file, not in a verbal promise. Anyone showing a property should also check whether house number, doorbell name plate or number plate are legible.

Events

At company parties, trade fairs and open days a visible notice at the entrance helps, but it does not replace consent in every case. Anyone photographing individual people deliberately needs their clearance; overview shots of an event are judged differently (§ 23 KunstUrhG).

Withdrawal and leavers: the process hardly any business has

A withdrawal of consent takes effect for the future (Art. 7 GDPR) - the picture then has to come down from the website, the careers page and profiles, including from sub-pages, blog posts and downloads that hardly anyone thinks of first. Whether a consent given ends automatically when someone leaves depends on the wording and on the individual case; the reliable answer is in the agreement itself. What helps in practice is a fixed step in the offboarding process: search the image stock for the name, pull the occurrences from the documentation, decide, record. Without such an overview a two-minute task turns into half a day of searching (project experience).

Layer 4: your own photos of the business

The most effective answer to the three previous layers is at the same time the best answer to the question of why anyone should call: your own image material. Anyone showing their people, their vehicles, their workshop and their finished jobs holds the usage rights in house, needs no external credit and delivers exactly the information that generic motifs withhold - that this business exists, here, in this region.

The difference shows in the detail. A purchased motif shows a tidy workbench in a studio; your own photo shows the workbench people actually work at, with the company sign on the wall and the van in the background that the visitor saw in their street last week. For local businesses this is the point at which images turn from decoration into argument - and the reason why we treat image concepts as part of conversion rate optimisation rather than as an afterthought.

Team and faces

Not a perfect studio portrait, but recognisable people at work. For trade businesses this is the strongest lever - how such a page is built is shown on our page on web design for trade businesses.

Vehicles and equipment

Lettered vehicles connect the website with the street scene. Anyone who recognises the van has already seen the business without noticing - a recognition value no purchased motif delivers.

Workshop, practice, shop floor

Rooms show order, equipment and size. In hospitality and retail the first look into the room often decides - which is what our page on web design for restaurants and hospitality is about.

Finished work with local context

Project pictures with a short description and a place name beat any general service description. The condition is the client's clearance where the property or people are recognisable.

Details and materials

Close-ups of workmanship, materials and tools look professional and can be taken without people. The consent question drops away entirely - an underrated stock of uncritical motifs.

Reception and treatment areas

In health professions, cleanliness, routes and accessibility count in the picture. What else has to be considered is set out on the page on web design for health professions.

Two side questions come up regularly with your own shots. First: works permanently located on public paths, streets or squares may be photographed from there and the shots exploited (§ 59 UrhG) - that does not extend to shots from a neighbour's property or from the air above a site. Second: on someone else's land, house rules decide whether photography is permitted at all; a customer's agreement to the shot is something different from their agreement to publication. Both belong in the same short clearance, ideally with one sentence on the scope.

The one contract question before every shoot

Before a photographer arrives, one sentence should state what the pictures may be used for: website, social media, ads, print, vehicles, trade fair - limited or unlimited in time, with or without editing, with or without transfer to service providers, with or without an author credit. This clarification costs little before the appointment and a great deal afterwards. And it decides whether the pictures may be reused at a later website relaunch or whether the shoot has to be repeated.

The image record: a table instead of a gut feeling

Everything described so far fails in daily practice at a single point: hardly anyone remembers two years later where image 47 came from. The most effective measure is therefore not a legal one but an organisational one - a plain list that records per image file what has been cleared. It fits into a spreadsheet, needs no additional system and lowers the risk noticeably, because in an emergency it supplies the proof that is otherwise missing.

Column	What goes in	What it is good for in an emergency
File name or ID	A short, descriptive name instead of IMG00023.JPG	Finding it again without searching - and at the same time a recommendation for image search (Google Search Central)
Author	Name of the photographer or of the employee who took the shot	Basis for the credit at the image (§ 13 UrhG)
Source and contract	Shoot, image library, supplier - with proof, invoice or licence number	Evidence that a licence exists at all
Licence scope	Media, editing, transfer, exclusivity (§ 31 UrhG)	Answer to the question of whether social media and ads are covered
Term	Unlimited or with an expiry date	A reminder before a licence quietly runs out
People in the picture	Names, date and scope of purpose of the consent	Basis for withdrawal and the offboarding process (Art. 7 GDPR)
Places of use	Pages, blog posts, downloads, profiles	Complete removal on withdrawal or licence expiry
Alternative text	Description of the image content in the page context	Accessibility and comprehension without the image (WebAIM Million)

The introduction works best backwards: no big archive project, but a start with the images that are online right now. Five steps are enough for the first pass.

Pull the stock: list all images on the website - home page, service pages, references, blog, downloads, careers page. PDF attachments and social media profiles belong in the list too.
Assign the origin: enter one of the six sources per image. Anything that cannot be assigned goes on a clarification list instead of into an assumption.
Collect the proof: file contracts, licence receipts, email clearances and consents in one place and link them in the table.
Close the gaps: replace unresolved images or license them retrospectively; where people are recognisable, obtain the clearance afterwards or swap the motif.
Keep it going: new images are published only once their row is filled in - that is the actual change of habit and the reason the list keeps working.

Why this beats any checklist from the web

An image record answers the three questions that matter in an emergency: where does the picture come from, what were we allowed to do with it, and where is it published? Businesses that keep this list settle an enquiry in minutes rather than days - and at a relaunch they decide which images carry over on the basis of facts rather than assumptions (project experience).

Technology: formats, sizes and alt text

Images are not only a legal topic but the largest item in page weight. On the median mobile home page, 911 KB of a total of 2,560 KB are images (HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2025), which is roughly 36 per cent (HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2025). On inner pages it is only 354 KB (HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2025), while on desktop it is 1,058 KB of 2,862 KB (HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2025). The curve points upwards: mobile home pages grew 8.4 per cent heavier compared with 2024 (HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2025).

That is no reason to do without images, but a reason for clean craftsmanship. Four points cover most of the topic.

Modern formats: image search supports JPEG, PNG, WebP, SVG and AVIF among others (Google Search Central). WebP and AVIF deliver considerably smaller files than an unprocessed camera JPEG at comparable visual quality.
Appropriate sizes: an image displayed at 400 pixels wide does not need 4,000 pixels. Using srcset and the picture element, the page serves the right variant per screen size; Google expressly recommends a fallback via src (Google Search Central).
Descriptive file names: short, meaningful names instead of IMG00023.JPG (Google Search Central) - they help image search and your own documentation alike.
Fixed dimensions and deferred loading: width and height in the markup prevent jumping layouts, and images outside the visible area are loaded later. How that interacts with the remaining factors is described in the article on improving website loading speed.

Alternative text is the point where technology, accessibility and visibility coincide - and at the same time the largest open building site on the web. On 53.1 per cent of the home pages examined, alternative text for images was missing (WebAIM Million), and 16.2 per cent of all home page images had no alternative text (WebAIM Million). Overall, 95.9 per cent of home pages showed detectable WCAG failures, at an average of 56.1 errors per page (WebAIM Million). For businesses covered by the German Accessibility Strengthening Act this is not a cosmetic flaw - what the law requires is set out in the article on the BFSG obligation for local businesses.

What a usable alt text achieves

It describes what can be seen in the image and what function it has in that position - no more. "Technician installing a heat pump on the outside wall of a detached house" is usable; a string of search terms is keyword stuffing, results in a poor user experience and may cause a site to be seen as spam (Google Search Central). Purely decorative images get an empty alt attribute so screen readers skip them. And a linked image needs text describing the target of the link: 45 per cent of the images missing alternative text were linked images (WebAIM Million).

One related topic is deliberately left out here: the labelling of AI-generated content. It follows its own rules and its own deadlines and is dealt with separately in the article on the AI labelling obligation for websites.

Image concept as part of web design and relaunch

In project practice the order is often reversed: the page gets built, then the images are missing, then something that happens to be at hand gets dropped in. Turning the order around saves money and nerves. The image concept - which motifs each page type needs, who takes them, which rights are agreed, who appears in them and with which clearance - belongs at the beginning, together with structure and copy.

For us that is a fixed part of web design from Hildesheim: image requirements per page type, a briefing for the shoot, cleared usage rights, consents for team and customer photos, technical preparation and alternative text. At a relaunch the backward look is added - which existing images may come along, which get replaced, which gaps remain. After that, website maintenance keeps the stock current: new staff in, leavers out, expired licences replaced, alternative text maintained for new content.

That images also pay into visibility is a welcome side effect: descriptive file names, alternative text and images in a thematically fitting context help image search, and page titles, descriptions and structured data influence how images appear in results (Google Search Central). It is a building block we take along in search engine optimisation rather than selling it as a separate project.

And because legal topics rarely come alone: where images advertise products or services, the same page also raises the question of the ordering process and the right of withdrawal - see the article on the withdrawal button on your website. And where images are meant to be delivered quickly, the foundation underneath has a say; what matters when choosing it is set out in the article on choosing web hosting for local businesses. If you would like to go through your image stock in an orderly way once, talk to us - the effort is usually smaller than feared.

This article is based on data from: the German Copyright Act (UrhG) on gesetze-im-internet.de, in particular § 13 on recognition of authorship and the author designation, § 31 on the granting of usage rights including simple and exclusive rights and the purpose-of-grant rule in paragraph 5, § 59 on freedom of panorama, § 64 on the term of protection of 70 years after the author's death, § 72 on the protection of simple photographs for 50 years from publication, § 97 on removal, injunctive relief and damages, and § 97a on the formal requirements for a warning letter and the cap on the object value at 1,000 euros for private recipients; the German Art Copyright Act (KUG) on gesetze-im-internet.de with § 22 on the consent of the person depicted and the ten-year period after death and § 23 on the four exceptions and the counter-exception in paragraph 2; Federal Court of Justice, judgment of 13 September 2018 - I ZR 187/17 (Sportwagenfoto) on measuring damages by licence analogy, on the decisive licensing practice of the rights holder, on the doubts about unilaterally drawn up fee recommendations and on the surcharge on the notional licence fee for the missing author credit; the General Data Protection Regulation, in particular Article 7 on withdrawal of consent, together with § 26 of the German Federal Data Protection Act on consent in the employment relationship, its form and the explanation in text form; HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2025, Page Weight chapter, with 911 KB of images out of 2,560 KB on the median mobile home page, 354 KB on mobile inner pages, 1,058 KB of 2,862 KB on desktop and an increase of 8.4 per cent compared with 2024; WebAIM Million on missing alternative text on 53.1 per cent of home pages, on 16.2 per cent of all home page images and with a share of 45 per cent linked images among the images without alternative text, as well as 95.9 per cent of home pages with detectable WCAG failures at an average of 56.1 errors per page; Google Search Central with its image guidelines, the supported image formats, descriptive file names, srcset and picture including fallback, and the note on keyword stuffing in alternative text.