As someone who already knows the value of cheap stock photos (5 agencies where you can buy them), it comes as no surprise if you were to look for ways to get even more value out of the stock photos you already purchased. Most the time, when you buy a stock photo, it comes with the royalty-free license. The royalty-free part means you don’t need to pay a royalty every single time you use it. The royalty is in the form of a fee. In other words, you don’t need to pay extra fees to reuse that picture for a different purpose. Once it’s on your account, it’s there for the life of the account.
Many images can be repurposed in ways that people otherwise wouldn’t imagine. Most people, when they download a stock photo image, only use the photo once. They have a particular purpose for which they purchased the photo, and it is for that particular purpose that the photo will be used. Once it’s used, it goes into your image library, never to be used again. However, that doesn’t need to be the case.
Carefully chosen photos can be used more than once. In fact, I would urge you to browse your image library before you purchase a new stock image. You may find one that fits your particular purpose without paying any extra money. An excellent example would be if you were the owner of a restaurant, and you were redesigning your menu. Chances are, you would have an image in your image library that portrays people eating food in a restaurant setting. Who’s to say that you can’t flip the photo from left to right and reuse it in your new menu? I mean, you’re not violating the 499,999 impression rule that comes with the royalty-free license. Chances are you’ll only print about 30 menus.
You can do the same thing for business cards. Place the same image on business cards for yourself. Most people don’t print more than a couple of thousand business cards – and that lasts them for a few years. Since you limited to creating 500,000 different copies of the same image, you’re free to get quite creative within the realm of your royalty-free license.
Here’s what you can’t do. You can’t resell the image in any way, shape, or form without an extended license. This means you can’t make calendars, business cards for other people, holiday cards or even T-shirts with the image. Read the stipulations of your license carefully, and then get creative.
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