What Are the Resale and Redistribution Rules for Royalty-Free Photos?

Royalty-free photos come with one restriction that surprises people: "royalty-free" describes how you may use a photo, not a right to pass it on. On Affordable Royalty-Free Photos you may build and sell anything that contains a photo. You may not distribute the photo as a file or as the sole content of a product. This article sets out the rule, the reasoning, and enough examples to settle most questions.

The rule in one sentence

You are licensed to use the photo; you are not licensed to supply it.

Supplying means giving another party a usable copy of the photo where the photo is what they are receiving. Money is irrelevant. Uploading our JPGs to a "free images" site is supplying. Selling them in an asset bundle is supplying. Including them unmodified in a template so buyers get a library is supplying. The license excludes all of it.

Why the restriction exists

If the files could be re-hosted anywhere, copies would appear on sites with different terms, sometimes with a fee added, sometimes with a claim of ownership. People who downloaded from those copies would be using the photos under conditions we never set. Keeping distribution on this domain keeps the license attached to the file. It is the only way a one-page license without accounts can stay meaningful.

Allowed

• Selling a brochure, magazine, book, or e-book that uses the photos as illustrations.
• Selling a website theme where a photo is demo content the buyer can replace.
• Selling merchandise where the photo is one element of a larger design you created: a poster with typography and layout, a card with your illustration over the photo.
• Selling a composite, such as a product shot on a photo background.
• Delivering the photos inside client work: decks, reports, campaigns, packaging.
• Handing the JPG to a printer, a collaborator, or a client for a specific job.

In all of these, the buyer pays for something you made and the photo lives inside it.

Not allowed

• Selling prints, canvases, posters, or framed art that consist of the photo alone or with trivial edits.
• Print-on-demand products where the photo is the entire design.
• Bundles, packs, membership libraries, or "premium downloads" that include the JPGs.
• Re-uploading to any stock, sharing, or file-hosting site for others to fetch.
• Serving the photos through your own API, plugin, or app to your users.
• Keeping a company-wide shared folder of our photos as a general image bank. Point colleagues to the site instead; the Download JPG button needs no account.
• Using the catalogue as training data for a system that produces competing stock imagery.

The commercial use article approaches the same boundary from the permitted side.

The grey zone

"How much do I have to change it?" is the wrong question. Effort is not the test. Ownership of what the buyer receives is. A filter, a crop, a border, or a colour grade leaves the photo as the product. A layered composite where the photo is background to your typography, illustration, and layout makes the design the product. If a buyer would feel misled to learn they paid for a free stock photo with a tint on it, you are on the wrong side.

Edge cases worth naming:

• A calendar with twelve photos and a date grid: the design is thin, and the photos are the point. Treat it as not allowed unless your design carries real weight.
• A social template pack where each template is a photo with a text box: same problem. Buyers are buying the photos.
• A course whose lessons use the photos as slides: allowed. The course is the product.

Removed photos and copies you already made

If a photo is removed from the catalogue later, copies you legitimately downloaded remain licensed. Removal does not create a duty to pull a printed brochure. The flag-an-issue article explains the rare case where an infringement claim changes that.

When unsure

Read the license page, then ask who is paying for what. If they are paying for your work, use the photo. If they would be paying for the photo, stop. Royalty-free photos from this site are meant to be absorbed into what you make, and the catalogue at all images is there to be used that way.