The reference page is built, the grid is waiting for pictures – and then the phone calls start. Whether the photo of the workshop hall may be shown. Who the man in the foreground actually is. Whether the photographer from back then can still be reached. Those follow-up questions cost more time than the photography itself, and they arrive at the worst possible moment: months after the job, when the contact person has changed and nobody remembers who is standing in the picture. Yet the order is a choice. Whoever collects the release during the job has it when it is needed. Legally, a job photo carries more than a courtesy: Section 22 of the German Act on the Protection of Copyright in Works of Art allows portraits to be distributed only with the consent of the person shown, after that person's death the consent of the relatives is required for a further 10 years, and anyone reusing someone else's photo moves inside protection periods of 50 and 70 years. This text does not turn that into legal advice; it turns it into a workflow: a release line with four fields, a note on the file – and three everyday cases where things otherwise stall.
Why the release belongs in the job
The best moment for a release is the moment the customer is satisfied.
That moment is the handover: the work is done, the company has delivered, and asking for a few photos for your own website is the most natural thing in the world that day. Four months later the same question is an imposition – the contact person has moved on, nobody remembers the name of the technician, and asking for a signature feels like a contract handed in late. Putting the release into the job workflow moves an awkward task to the point where it costs nothing. And it produces an answer while everyone is still on site: the employee in the picture is standing three metres away, and the customer already has the pen in hand.
Two separate questions run side by side in job photos, and conversations mix them up constantly: who took the picture, and who is visible in it. For the second question, Section 22 of the Act on the Protection of Copyright in Works of Art sets the rule: portraits may only be distributed or publicly displayed with the consent of the person depicted. A website does both – it distributes the image and displays it publicly. After the death of the person shown, the consent of the relatives is required until 10 years have passed; that case is rare, but it does occur, for instance at a company anniversary with old factory photographs. Which motifs come into question at all is sorted out in the overview of image rights and real motifs.
Alongside that sits the General Data Protection Regulation, because a recognisable face is personal data. For a workflow inside a company, the burden of proof matters more than the legal basis: where processing is based on consent, the controller has to be able to demonstrate that the data subject has consented (Article 7 paragraph 1 GDPR). A nod on the building site is not a form of proof. That is precisely why the release is a line with a name and a date rather than a memory. How origin and rights differ per image source – stock photo, team photo, generated image – is set out in the summary of stock photos, team photos and AI images.
The two-minute test
Case 1: a person is in the picture
Job photos rarely show only the workpiece. The technician holds the component, the customer stands next to the new system, someone walks through the background.
As soon as a person is recognisable, the rule from Section 22 applies – and recognisable means recognisable to that person's own circle, not just in a frontal portrait. Distinctive workwear, a tattoo, a caption with place and date: any of those can be enough for colleagues and neighbours to know who is standing there.
The law knows exceptions, and those are the part most often overestimated. Section 23 paragraph 1 permits, among other things, pictures in which the persons appear only as an accessory alongside a landscape or other locality. Accessory means the picture would be the same picture without that person. As soon as someone carries the gaze, demonstrates the work step or makes the motif interesting in the first place, they are no longer an accessory. And even where the exception applies, paragraph 2 excludes distribution that infringes a legitimate interest of the person depicted. For a company that means: the exception is a safety net, not a working method.
- Name and role of the person shown: employee, customer, guest, neighbour
- The uses in plain words – your own website, reference page, posts on social networks, printed material
- A note that an image on the internet can be copied and that later removal only covers your own page
- The duration: open ended or up to a date that sits in the calendar
- The route for withdrawal: one address where a single sentence is enough
- Date and signature, or an email confirmation that stays findable in the mailbox
With employees, voluntariness comes on top: consent collected alongside an employment contract only counts as consent if saying no carries no consequences. It has proven useful to treat team pictures and work pictures separately and to ask one fixed question when someone leaves: does the picture stay or go? Whoever decides who in the company may publish at all will find the matching roles in running a website as a team. For pages that deliberately address young talent, the look at apprenticeships on the website is worth adding, because young faces take centre stage there – and minors follow their own rules, as described for a daycare website with enrolment and child photos.
The provision that is rarely quoted
Case 2: the photo was taken at the customer's
Anyone replacing a boiler in a basement is photographing inside someone else's house. Access comes with the job; photography does not, and publication even less so.
Several threads run at once here: the property rights of the owner or tenant, the personality rights of the residents, and in business premises whatever hangs on the wall in the background – machine schedules, customer lists, technical drawings. An agreement that only covers the component does not cover the room.
For interiors, criminal law draws an additional line. Section 201a paragraph 1 of the German Criminal Code makes it an offence to produce or transmit, without authorisation, a picture of another person who is in a dwelling or a room specially protected against view, thereby violating that person's most personal sphere of life; the range extends to two years of imprisonment. The everyday case is far more harmless and still delicate: in the photo of the new bathroom, the family's laundry sits on the shelf and family pictures hang in the hallway. That is not criminal law, but it is the reason why interior shots need their own agreement and do not simply fall under a general release for job photos.
Scroll table sideways
| Where the photo was taken | Who has to agree | What the release should state |
|---|---|---|
| Exterior view from the public street | nobody in addition, as long as no person is recognisable | location and the reference to Section 59 of the Copyright Act |
| Customer's property | owner or tenant, through their property rights | access for photography and publication, named separately |
| Interior of a dwelling | the residents, in addition to the people shown | which rooms are shown and what must not appear in the frame |
| Customer's business premises | management, and depending on the company the works council | confidentiality, unreadable documents, release per image |
| Building site with several trades | the client and each affected company | naming other firms, vehicles and logos in the picture |
Freedom of panorama helps outdoors and only to a point. Section 59 paragraph 1 of the German Copyright Act permits works permanently located on public ways, streets or squares to be reproduced, distributed and communicated to the public by photograph. Sentence 2 narrows it: in the case of buildings, these rights extend only to the external appearance. That is the basis for the facade of the new building, not for the hall seen from inside. The difference is visible while shooting: from the street and without aids – then the provision carries; from the neighbouring plot, from the yard or from a ladder – then it does not.
Three sentences for the site visit
Case 3: the picture comes from the predecessor
During a relaunch the old images travel along. They sit in the export of the previous site, they look usable, and they have been paid for – so the assumption goes.
What was paid for back then, however, was a service, not automatically a right. An invoice for a photo shoot says nothing in itself about whether the pictures may be used on a new site, in a new crop, under a different domain or in an advertisement. And the photographer who spent two hours in the yard did not hand over his copyright with the invoice.
What gets passed on is not copyright but rights of use. Section 31 paragraph 1 of the German Copyright Act describes how: the author may grant another person the right to use the work in individual or all types of use – as a simple or exclusive right, limited in territory, time or content. If the contract says nothing specific, paragraph 5 makes the underlying purpose of the contract decisive, and in case of doubt that purpose is read narrowly. Anyone taking over pictures from the previous agency therefore follows the trail back to the author and gets the result in writing in two sentences.
The periods are long enough that the age of an image is no argument. A simple photograph is protected under Section 72 paragraph 3 of the Copyright Act for fifty years after publication; a photographic work falls under Section 64, according to which copyright expires seventy years after the author's death. Section 13 comes on top: the author has the right to be recognised as the author of the work and may determine whether the work is to carry an authorship designation – a missing credit is therefore a point of its own and not a harmless oversight. And anyone using a work without the right owes damages under Section 97 paragraph 2, which may also be calculated on the basis of the amount the infringer would have had to pay as reasonable remuneration.
- Establish the origin: who took the picture, when and on whose behalf – file name, metadata and the old invoice all help
- Find the contract or quote from back then and read the line about rights of use, not the headline
- Check whether the intended use appears in it: new website, new domain, social channel, print, advertising
- Ask the photographer if the paperwork is silent – a short written confirmation is cheaper than any research
- If nothing can be clarified: retire the image and replace it instead of dragging it along in the library
The cost comparison that shortens the decision
The release line: four fields are enough
A release does not have to look like a contract in order to hold. Four fields cover the questions that get asked later, and they fit on the handover sheet the company has signed anyway.
The advantage of this form is organisational rather than legal: it gets filled in because it sits where a signature happens anyway – not in a folder someone would have to go looking for.
Who grants it
Name, role and signature of the person entitled to decide: the customer for their property, the employee for their own picture, the client for the building site. If only a company name appears here, the contact person is missing later.
What it covers
The uses named one by one: own website and reference page, posts on social networks, printed material, advertisements. Whatever is not written down does not count as released – which protects both sides from a later dispute.
Until when
Open ended or with an end date. A date has the advantage of being visible in the library and triggering a reminder before it runs out, instead of leaving an image running unnoticed for years.
How to withdraw
One address and one sentence are enough. Article 7 paragraph 3 of the General Data Protection Regulation gives the data subject the right to withdraw consent at any time and requires withdrawal to be as easy as giving consent.
Release for photos from this job
Job: [number, site, date]
Released by: [name, role]
Covers: own website, reference page,
posts on social networks
Not included: advertisements, transfer to third parties
Duration: open ended / until [date]
Withdrawal to: [company email address]
Images: [count], file list attached
Place, date, signatureWithdrawal is the point where a release fails in practice – not because it happens often, but because nobody is prepared for it. Article 7 paragraph 3 of the General Data Protection Regulation records that withdrawal must be as easy as giving consent and that the lawfulness of processing carried out until then remains unaffected. Translated into a company: one email is enough, the picture disappears from the page within a few days, and nobody has to correct anything retroactively. For that to work, you have to know everywhere the image sits – which is exactly what the note in the library is for. That a right of withdrawal in consumer business also affects the order side is shown in the piece on withdrawal in website contracts.
What a release does not cover
The note on the file
A release that sits in a folder rather than on the image is lost after the second change of staff. The status therefore belongs on the file: whoever pulls an image into a page should see at the same place whether they may.
The file name does not carry that. An identifier like IMG 4821 says nothing at all, and a prefix such as ok hyphen survives nobody's third month, because it disappears at the first rename.
- Release: granted, missing, or usable internally only
- Who granted it, with a date – the name is enough, the document sits next to it
- What the release covers, in the same words as on the form
- Until when it holds, so that an expiry becomes visible before it arrives
- Who took the picture and whether an author credit is requested
- Which job it belongs to, so that image and reference text find each other
This is exactly where XICflow starts: the media library keeps a field for the release status on every image, and the blocks for references and project pages pull their motifs from the same library. How those blocks are built is described in the handbook under media and showcase; the daily work with images, posts and project pages sits in the section on content, media and blog. What of that belongs to the scope of service is shown in the overview of features, and how a page comes about from enquiry to publication is described in the four-step process.
Scroll table sideways
| Note on the image | What happens on the page | What the company sees |
|---|---|---|
| Release granted, open ended | image appears on the project page and in the selection list | green note with the name and date of the release |
| Release until a date | image is shown until the date is reached | a notice before expiry, with time to ask again |
| Internal only | image stays in the library and appears in no selection | yellow note with the reason |
| No release | image belongs on no public page | red note and the open question next to it |
| Origin unclear | image is listed as unresolved and never suggested | a note saying which detail is missing |
When the release is missing: what still works
Not every job ends with a signature, and some customers simply do not want to be named. That is no reason to go without pictures – it is a reason to choose the motif differently.
A reference lives from the visible result, not from the customer's name, and many of the strongest shots show work rather than people anyway. Which motifs on a reference page actually trigger enquiries is shown in the piece on project photos that bring enquiries.
- The detail: seam, joint, connection, transition – close enough that neither place nor person is recognisable
- Before and after from the same position, without a view into private rooms
- Material and tools in your own workshop, with your own team and your own release
- The exterior view from the public street, when the building is the motif
- The crop instead of the wide shot: whatever falls outside the frame needs no release
- A drawing or plan, as long as no customer details appear on it
Where it gets tight, a sober assessment helps more than courage. With recognisable people and no agreement, with interior shots of other people's homes and with images of unknown origin, going without is the cheapest decision. When something larger is coming up – a campaign, a company film, customer pictures in paid advertising – the review belongs in expert hands. This text describes a workflow inside a company and does not replace legal advice in an individual case. How customer logos and reference mentions are to be judged beyond that is set out in showing client references and logos legally.
Portraits may only be distributed or publicly displayed with the consent of the person depicted.
Introduced in one week
The workflow can be introduced in a week without anyone learning a new tool. Day one: add the release line to the existing handover sheet.
Day two: go through the stock on the reference page and give each image one of three answers – released, unclear, out. Days three to five: work through the unclear cases by phone, with an email that contains the same four fields as text. After that nothing new arrives without a release, and that is exactly where the gain sits: the effort happens once, the calm remains.
- A release line with four fields on the handover sheet, printed and in the vehicle
- One fixed address for withdrawals that stays reachable after a change of staff
- One field on the image in the media library that carries the release status
- A list of images with unresolved origin, with a date for the decision
- A rule for employee pictures when someone leaves, written down in three sentences
- A fixed date each quarter for reviewing releases that are about to expire
The pictures themselves do not suffer from that order – they tend to improve, because what may be shown is already settled while shooting. How project photos are used in a trade with many outdoor shots is shown by the example of landscaping and garden construction. What a well-kept reference section does on a finished page can be seen in the example pages. Technically, only the question of format and alternative text remains, which the piece on images on the website answers.
The sentence that carries the reference page