Stock photography: selling rights RF vs. RM
Selling stock photos is complicated by the various ways now available to do so. There is one choice that has to be made before a photo gets to the marketplace: Whether to market it RF - Royalty Free - or RM - Rights Managed. These 2 options determine how, when, and where your photo is likely to be used, and how much you’re likely to make from it.
Royalty-Free means that the buyer pays one price, and can use the photo however they want, as long as they want. They can keep the photo on file to re-use if the need arises (they can’t sell it; you keep that right). Rights-Managed photos are used by the buyer one time, for a specific purpose, in a defined medium - on the web, in a book, in a magazine, whatever. The use is spelled out. If the buyer wants to use it again, they have to buy it again. If the buyer wants to keep it exclusive, they can, but they have to pay more for that right.
As a rule, RF photos typically sell for more than RM. However, RM photos may be re-purchased for subsequent uses, and fees can become astronomical - the cloud background on Windows is a good example. That photo eventually earned the photographer hundreds of thousands of dollars.
If the initial price of an RM photo is less than an RF, why not sell all photos as RF? Some people do, but they are giving away any future rights that buyer might be willing to pay for, for what could be an absurdly low price. A photo used on a web page might sell for $20 as either RF or RM. But that same photo (if an RM) might sell for $10,000 if it is used in a nationwide ad campaign. So a smart photo marketer keeps that market in mind when deciding how to sell a photo.
How do you choose which rights to sell? In a perfect photographer’s world, all photos would be RM. In a perfect publisher’s world, photos would be RF, except for those pictures that a publisher wants exclusivity.
Most of my photos are RM. When I choose to market one as RF, it is for a specific reason - there’s no way the photo could be exclusive. A picture of Alcatraz Island shot from a boat in the harbor would be RF - because every photographer who has been on that boat took that same picture. The photo I use on this blog as a header - Alcatraz, and San Francisco harbor - is unusual, and it could only have been taken from one place (12th floor of an exclusive apartment building, above Fisherman’s Wharf) which is not accessed by many other people. So it is exclusive enough to mark RM. A bowl of strawberries and cream would be RF - any decent photographer could shoot it - but a photo of strawberries in the field showing the irrigation technique is unique enough that I’d mark it RM.
