Ep.22 On Files, Files, Files
In today’s digital age of photography it’s impossible to avoid conversations about selling files. In this podcast (from the deepest depths of beautiful Cornwall I might add, with sounds of birds tweeting in the background) we discuss the pressures on photography businesses to sell their files and give up copyright.
As a rule we don’t sell high-resolution files (by high-resolution I mean the same pixel resolution as the camera sensor – full size files) but we do sell files that can be printed up to about 10×8″. I’ll try and explain the logic!
Concepts:
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Very interesting and insightful podcast. I’m guilty of giving away / delivering my full-resolution files upon processing them for clients. I agree with everything you’ve said in this podcast and it’s a real eye-opener so it’s something I’m going to adopt in to my workflow when exporting. I do have a few question: as photographers, our work is ours, but I often feel like clients (being the subject of a photo or photos) have some sense of ownership of the images. How did you overcome this notion? Do you have anything in your T&C’s to address what rights clients have… Read more »
Hi Drazen, Good question – it’s always tricky but here are some guidelines that we use here. Firstly, the copyright for the image automatically applies to the creator of the image (at least under UK law so I am going to assume that’s also true across the EU. The US etc. may be different.) We don’t have anything in the contract but I am always clear and confident about who owns the images – after all, the client has come to me in the first place to CREATE the images. GDPR is an interesting thing. Firstly, photographs are not even… Read more »
Hi Paul, thanks for providing your thoughts here, they are very useful. I was under the impression any information that can be used to identify a living individual is classified as Personal Data, as such (e.g. a photo). Interesting you mention there was a case above where the photos were indeed provided, but in low-res – this seems reasonable enough and I’d hope this satisfies any SAR. I really enjoyed this podcast, and perhaps in the future you can tell us a little about how you manage your storage; from RAW files to the outputs. Do you store them locally… Read more »
Thanks Drazen. I’ll add that as a topic to the podcast list (I think it might be on there already but I’ll check). In short form we use 3 Drobos – 1x5D and 2x5N each with about 10TB on board. We then archive to SATA disks. This doesn’t answer the question but just gives a sense of our approach. As for the peace of mind, I am not certain I will ever be entirely comfortable as reliable off-site backup is still too expensive and too slow, at least in the short term. Cheers p. PS. Sorry that some of these… Read more »
Wow, some serious hardware and I guess in your circumstances necessary! For now I’ve a RAID1 setup and a few TB’s of data to use up. I’ll consider an entry-level drobo for later down the line when I’m eating lot’s of data through raw and finished files. Thank you again for sharing your setup, these are the things (amongst many others) that aren’t immediately visible from a backed perspective.
We have the hardware ’cause I’ve been on the wrong end of failure a couple of times! It’s SCARY! The Drobo units are good but not perfect – the 5Ns are slow – but I love the fact I can have two disks fail (and they do) and I can rebuild it without even killing the power. Has saved me a couple of times!
Paul is absolutely right that photographs are not considered data just because they are digital. At least until there’s a court case or some other precedent that changes that – either way it’s probably a good idea to remove personally identifiable info from the meta data (Faces tagged on Facebook are covered by Facebook ts & cs so no worry there). Interestingly as part of the overkill that GDPR created Facebook also asked people to opt in to facial recognition to make sure they were covered for the future which is an interesting development as that technology is only going… Read more »
Thanks Ian!