How to Use Images Legally on Your Business Website

The quiet trading weeks of late summer are when a lot of Irish business owners finally get around to tidying up the website they built in a rush. New photos, a fresh homepage banner, a few product shots.

That refresh is exactly where a slow, growing legal risk hides. Every image you add to your site is a licensing decision, whether you treat it as one or not. Most owners do not, and the ones who find that out the hard way usually find out through an email they did not expect.

Let me walk you through how this actually works, where people get caught, and how to source images you can prove you were allowed to use. This is not legal advice, and if a letter has already landed you should talk to a solicitor. But most of this is common sense that nobody explains until it is too late.

The Google Images Myth That Costs Real Money

The belief that gets small businesses into trouble is simple: if you can right-click and save it, it must be free to use. It feels reasonable. It is completely wrong.

Under the Irish Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000, a photograph is an "artistic work" and copyright belongs to the photographer the instant the shutter clicks. No registration, no copyright symbol, no paperwork required. The protection is automatic, it typically lasts the creator's lifetime plus 70 years, and it applies whether or not the image has a watermark. A photo appearing in a Google search result tells you the photo exists on the internet. It tells you nothing about whether you are allowed to publish it.

So what does that mean for you, sitting there dragging a nice-looking stock photo onto your About page? It means you have taken someone's property and put it on a commercial website. And there is now an entire industry built on finding you.

Agencies such as PicRights and the licensing arm of Getty Images run automated crawlers that scan millions of websites, reverse-matching published images against their catalogues. When their software finds one of their photos on your site without a matching licence, you get a demand letter. Not a friendly "please take that down". A demand for payment.

What a Copyright Demand Letter Actually Looks Like

Consider a typical case, because this is a pattern we see rather than one business I can name. A garden centre outside Roscommon town rebuilds its website, grabs a bright photo of potted plants from a search result, and moves on. Eighteen months later an email arrives from a licensing agency, citing that exact image, quoting the Copyright Act, and requesting a settlement of several hundred euro. The owner has long forgotten where the photo even came from.

That is the part people underestimate. The letter rarely arrives while you are looking. It arrives on a random Tuesday, long after the decision, attached to a photo you cannot even remember choosing.

A few things worth understanding about these letters, because they are widely misread:

• The opening figure is a starting position, not a fixed fine. Reporting from copyright practitioners and licensing specialists is consistent on this point: the first demand is usually several times the ordinary licence fee, and many cases settle for a good deal less. That does not make it a scam, and ignoring it is genuinely risky, but the number in the letter is negotiable.
• Taking the image down does not erase the claim. The alleged infringement already happened. Removing it is sensible, but on its own it does not make the letter go away.
• Do not fire back an admission. Copyright specialists caution against replying with "sorry, I did not know". An admission of liability can strengthen the other side's position. Acknowledge receipt, stop using the image, and get advice before you agree to anything.

The frustrating part, and the reason I find these cases genuinely annoying rather than just unfortunate, is that the whole thing is avoidable for zero cost. You never needed that particular photo. There were thousands of perfectly good images you were free to use.

Where to Get Images You Are Actually Allowed to Use

You do not need a budget for this. For most Irish businesses, a free licence library covers the vast majority of what a website needs, and that is not a compromise, it is genuinely enough. Paid stock only earns its place when you need something specific that the free libraries do not carry.

The practical landscape looks like this.

Source type	Typical cost	The catch to watch	Best for
Free-licence libraries	Free	Model releases, "no reselling" rules	Most small business sites
Paid stock	Subscription or per image	Licence tied to your account, keep the receipt	A specific look you cannot find free
Creative Commons	Free with conditions	Attribution is mandatory	Blogs, informational pages
AI image generators	Free to low cost	Ownership and likeness are unsettled	Abstract or illustrative filler
Your own camera	Free	Your time	The images that actually sell you

Free-licence libraries

Sites like Unsplash and Pexels grant a broad licence to use their photos commercially, in most cases with no attribution required. Read the actual terms, though, because "free" has edges. The Unsplash licence, for example, lets you use images commercially without crediting the photographer, but it does not let you resell them unmodified, and it does not guarantee a model release for photos of recognisable people. If a stranger's face is on your advertising, that is a separate permission you may still need. For a café, a tradesperson, or a shop, these libraries are usually all you will ever require.

Paid stock

Adobe Stock, Shutterstock, and yes, Getty itself, sell licences for images you cannot find free. The service you are paying for is not really the photo. It is the licence and the paper trail. When you buy properly, you get a record that proves you were allowed to use the image. Keep that invoice somewhere you can find it, because the one time you will need it is the day a demand letter questions an image you actually paid for.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons images sit between free and paid: free to use, but with conditions attached, and every CC licence requires attribution. The community's own attribution guidance recommends the TASL method, Title, Author, Source, Licence. Miss the credit and you have breached the licence, which puts you back in infringement territory. One caution worth stating plainly: an image on Flickr or Wikimedia is not automatically Creative Commons. Check the specific licence on the specific photo, every time.

AI image generators

Generating your own images with an AI tool sidesteps stock licensing entirely, and for abstract or illustrative backgrounds it works well. Two honest caveats. First, ownership is unsettled: the US Copyright Office ruled in early 2025 that a purely AI-generated image, created from prompts alone, is not eligible for copyright protection because it lacks human authorship. The Irish and EU position is still developing. In plain terms, you can usually publish an AI image, but you may not be able to claim it as your own protected property, and a competitor could use a near-identical one.

Second, an AI tool can still reproduce a recognisable face or a trademarked logo, which lands you in the same likeness and brand problems as any other image.

Your own camera

The best images on any small business website are almost always the owner's own. A real photo of your actual premises, your team, your product on the bench, carries a trust no stock photo matches, and shapes the first impression a visitor forms in seconds. You own the copyright outright the moment you take it. A modern phone is more than good enough. This is the one source with no licence to read, no attribution to add, and no letter to fear.

How to Vet an Image Before You Use It

You do not need to become a copyright expert. You need a thirty-second habit that runs before any image goes on the site.

1. Trace it. Know exactly where the image came from and what licence covers it. "It was on Google" is not a source.
2. Read the licence, not the vibe. Confirm the terms allow commercial use, and check whether attribution or a model release applies to your use.
3. Attribute where required. If the licence asks for a credit, add it properly, below the image, using Title, Author, Source, Licence.
4. Keep the receipt. Save the download page, invoice, or licence terms in one folder. Proof you were allowed to use an image is worthless if you cannot find it later.
5. When in doubt, shoot it or skip it. If you cannot confirm the rights in under a minute, take your own photo or choose a different one.

Why This Is Really About Owning Your Website

Step back and the image question is one piece of a bigger principle: on a business website, you should be able to account for everything on it. The words, the design, the photos, the data. That is what genuine ownership of your website actually means, and it is the difference between an asset you control and a liability you have not read yet.

This is where the platform underneath you matters more than people expect. Full WordPress gives you a proper media library and the entire plugin ecosystem, so you can pull in properly licensed images, organise them, and keep your own records, rather than being boxed into a closed system that decides for you. With Web60, that full WordPress site, hosting, backups, and support come as one all-inclusive package for €60 a year, and it is yours to control from the first day. You are not renting space in someone else's walled garden. You own the site, and you own the responsibility that comes with it, which is exactly the position a serious business owner wants to be in.

None of this requires a legal department. It requires a small change in habit: treat every image as a licensing decision, source from places you can prove, and photograph your own business wherever you can. Do that, and the demand letter that catches so many owners off guard simply never has a photo to point at.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use images from Google Images on my website?

Not unless you have confirmed the specific image's licence. Google Images is a search tool, not a source of free-to-use photos. Most results are copyrighted, and publishing one without permission is an infringement, even if you took it down afterwards. Use the licence tools within image search only as a starting point, then verify on the original site.

Is it really illegal, or do companies just send scary letters?

Both can be true at once. Under the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000, using a photograph without the owner's permission is a genuine infringement with real civil liability. Licensing agencies do send aggressive opening demands that exceed the normal fee, and those figures are negotiable, but the underlying claim is usually legitimate. Ignoring a letter is not a safe strategy.

Are Unsplash and Pexels images safe for commercial use?

Generally yes, and for most small business websites they are all you need. Read the licence, though. You typically do not need to credit the photographer, but you cannot resell the images unmodified, and photos of recognisable people may need a model release the library does not provide. For advertising featuring a stranger's face, take extra care.

Do I need to credit free stock photos?

It depends on the licence. Unsplash and Pexels do not require attribution for standard use, but every Creative Commons licence does. When a credit is required, include the title, author, source, and licence, placed near the image. When you are unsure, adding a credit costs nothing and protects you.

Can I use AI-generated images without any copyright worry?

You can usually publish them, but with two caveats. A purely AI-generated image may not qualify for copyright protection, so you may not be able to claim it as your own, and the US Copyright Office confirmed this position in 2025. AI tools can also produce recognisable faces or logos, which carry their own permission problems. For abstract or background imagery they are a reasonable option.

What should I do if I get a copyright demand letter?

Stop using the image, but do not reply with an admission of fault. Gather any evidence of where you sourced the image and whether you held a licence. Then get advice from a solicitor before agreeing to any payment. The opening figure is a negotiating position, not a fixed penalty, and how you respond matters.

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