You know the value of a photo when you’re trying to engage your audience – but do you understand the cost of using an image you aren’t licensed to use?

Tracking image licenses is a time-consuming, tedious, yet necessary, task that too often slips through the cracks – at a high cost. A recent study by the American Intellectual Property Law Association estimated the average cost of litigating a copyright infringement case ranged from $384,000 to $2 million. Every year, countless companies ranging from small businesses to major retail brands are slammed for using images without permission.

If a million-dollar lawsuit isn’t scary enough, using a photo you don’t have the right to use can result in a social media firestorm and a PR nightmare for your brand.

And, even if you go about securing the rights to an image the right way, licenses expire. Using an image beyond the contract puts you back in dangerous territory.

Introducing License Alerts!

The PhotoShelter for Brands License Alerts feature will help you keep track of image licenses and reduce potential costly risks.

Watch the video below to see how License Alerts can help your brand stay proactive about managing image licenses by taking the work off your plate and automating it!

License Alerts are included on all Professional and Enterprise level PhotoShelter accounts. Book a demo, or contact Client Services to upgrade your account.

What will License Alerts do for you?

When you’re racing to keep up with the constant demand for visual content, you still need to keep track of usage rights for all images and videos in your DAM Library—or else you’re risking a lawsuit and your brand’s reputation.

And, while you’re a trained marketing executive, you probably don’t have a law degree, so you definitely don’t have the time to manage a massive library of images and their licenses, too.

With License Alerts, you can:

• Add license expiration dates to images
• Get email notifications about expiring image licenses
• See usage rights at a glance with watermarks that display automatically when an image license has expired
• Stay ahead of expiring licenses so you can renew them or remove them from current projects
• Ensure no one on your team uses an image you don’t have the rights to use

How to Manage License Alert Preferences

With License Alerts, you can choose when you want to be notified that an image license is about to expire, so you have enough time to renew the license or remove the image from current projects.

You can choose to be notified either 30 days before, 14 days before, or on the day a license expires.

You can enable and disable License Alerts at any time. If you decide to turn off License Alerts, your license metadata will be hidden, but not deleted.

Note: Before you can start editing license metadata, you need to turn this feature on and set your preferences. Only the admin on your PhotoShelter for Brands account can enable, disable and set preferences for License Alerts.

1. Add license expiration dates to images.

Once you’ve set up your preferences, head into your Library to add license expiration dates to your images. All of your back-end Library users including the Library admin, editors, and taggers – can add and edit license expiration dates.

You can add a license expiration date to a single image, or select a group of images to apply license metadata in batches.

Plus, you can always edit or remove license expiration dates.

Pro Tip: Use the IPTC Usage Rights field, which displays underneath the License Expiration Date field on your Portal, to give your stakeholders extra information about when, where, and how they can use the images. This is also where you can indicate whether and how they can request a license renewal if they’re interested in using an image beyond its current license period.

2. See usage rights at a glance

License expiration dates display in the Library and on the Portal, so everyone who needs to use an image knows when its license will expire.

3. Get email notifications about expiring image licenses.

You’ll get an email notification whenever an image license is expiring, based on your preferences (remember, you can choose to be notified 30 days before, 14 days before, or on the day an image license expires).

These notifications will have live links to the images affected. Click them to easily change their download permissions or move them to another gallery, so you can ensure people don’t have access to photos you don’t have the right to use.

Pro Tip: If the same license expiration date applies to all of the images in a gallery, set a gallery-level expiration date in the Visibility & Access settings so your stakeholders don’t have permission to download the assets after their licenses expire.

4. Automatically watermark expired images.

Watermarks will display automatically when an image license has expired (or when it is about to expire, if you’ve chosen to be notified 30 or 14 days beforehand).

Watermarks are visible in the Library and on the Portal, so everyone on your team knows not to use the image in upcoming projects.

Plus, you can see the watermark when you’re looking at a single image or when you’re browsing thumbnails so it’s easy to recognize expired images.

Pro Tip: If you want to know who has downloaded an image with a soon-to-expire or expired license, check the “Stats” section in the right-hand pane of your Library. Reach out to them to ensure they know they no longer have the right to use the image.

Secure Your Brand Assets With License Alerts

License Alerts have you covered. Head into your Library to get started, or check out our help article for more information.

License Alerts are included with all Professional and Enterprise level PhotoShelter accounts.

Book a demo, or contact Customer Support to upgrade your account.