How Image Licensing Works When You Commission B2B Photography
Two companies can book the same photographer, for the same day, at the same fee, and walk away owning very different things. The difference is not in the shoot. It is in the licence: the written definition of who may use the images, where, for how long, and for what. In B2B photography the licence is the product; the shoot day is how it gets made.
This guide explains how image licensing works when you commission photography in Spain, what the law assumes when a contract says nothing, and how we structure it at TKM Photo so that procurement, marketing and legal all know what was bought.
The five parameters that define a licence
Across the European industry, from the guidance of the UK Association of Photographers to the German MFM tables that German courts use to value image rights, a photography licence is defined by the same five parameters:
- Media. Where the images may appear: web and social, internal reports and presentations, print and trade fairs, paid advertising. Each is a different scope.
- Territory. One country, a region, or worldwide. A launch campaign for the Spanish market and a global rollout are different licences.
- Duration. A licence can run for a fixed term or be perpetual. Perpetual use of a corporate library is a broader grant than one campaign season.
- Exclusivity. Whether the photographer may licence the same images to anyone else. Exclusivity is never implied; it exists only when it is written down.
- Transferability. Whether you may pass the images on: to a parent company, a subsidiary, a franchise partner, or a supplier who appears in the frame. By default, you may not.
A quote that names these five points can be compared with any other quote. A quote that says only a fee and a day rate cannot, because you do not yet know what the fee buys.
What Spanish law assumes when the contract is silent
Nothing in this guide is legal advice; it describes how we work as photographers. For anything contractual, your own legal team has the final word.
Spain's intellectual property law fills the gaps in an unwritten or vague agreement, and it fills them narrowly. If no duration is stated, the transfer of rights is limited to five years. If no territory is stated, it is limited to the country where the transfer took place. If the permitted uses are not spelled out, the client receives only the uses that follow necessarily from the purpose of the contract. Exclusivity must be granted expressly or it does not exist, and owning the files themselves grants no usage rights at all.
There is one important exception: for work commissioned specifically as advertising, Spanish advertising law presumes that exploitation rights pass to the advertiser for the purposes foreseen in the contract, unless agreed otherwise.
None of this is a reason to rely on defaults, in either direction. The defaults protect nobody's plans; they simply punish whichever side assumed more than was written. A one page licence removes the ambiguity for both.
How TKM Photo licenses commissioned work
Our standard model is a broad but defined licence included in the fee, so that the everyday case needs no negotiation at all:
- The commissioning company receives a licence for its own corporate marketing and communications: web, social, internal, PR, presentations and print, worldwide.
- Your agencies may use the images when acting on your behalf, on your projects.
- The licence is not exclusive and is not transferable to third parties. Other companies involved in the same project licence their own use separately.
- Extended exclusivity, advertising buyouts and full transfers exist, priced and agreed in writing before the shoot.
Every delivery includes a short licence document naming the licensed company, the media, the territory and the duration. Retail and brand launch work is quoted with the broad commercial licence already inside the fee, because those images are made to be published. Industrial and architectural work carries a licence line of its own in the quotation, since the same photograph can serve an internal audit report or a global campaign, and those are not the same purchase.
Third parties on the same project
An industrial or architectural shoot usually has more beneficiaries than one. The developer commissions the images, and then the architect wants them for an awards entry, the main contractor for its website, a product manufacturer for a case study. Standard practice across the sector is that each company licenses its own use; in our pricing, that costs a fraction of a new shoot.
The practical move is to ask the question at the quote stage: will anyone else on this project want these images? Naming the second and third companies before the shoot lets everyone share the production cost instead of negotiating afterwards, and it is cheaper for each party than licensing later.
RAW files and the archive
RAW files are not part of the delivery, which is the norm in commercial photography: a RAW file is the negative, not the photograph, and it leaves colour, retouching and therefore the delivered quality outside anyone's control. What you receive are finished, retouched files in the formats your channels need, in web and print resolution.
Delivered projects stay in a managed archive. If you need additional selects months later, or a company that joined the project after delivery needs its own licence, the images are retrievable without a new shoot. Licensing existing images from the archive is covered on our image licensing page.
What to put in your brief
You do not need to draft licence language to get a precise quote. Answering five questions in the brief is enough:
- Which company is the licensee, and are there subsidiaries or a parent brand that will also publish the images?
- Which channels: web and social only, internal reporting, print, trade fairs, paid advertising?
- Which markets: Spain, Europe, worldwide?
- For how long, and does anything need to be exclusive?
- Will any other company on the project want its own licence?
With those answers the licence is written in one paragraph, the quote matches the real use, and nobody discovers a gap two years later.
If you are planning a commissioned shoot in Madrid or elsewhere in Spain, the industrial photography and retail photography pages describe how those productions run, and licensing questions are welcome before any quote.