Can you use free tourist-board photos of Réunion on a client’s website?
, Nom Prénom
The question comes up on every tourism project: the client wants good images of the island, the photography budget is zero, and eventually someone says “the tourist board library is free”. It is free. It is not usable.
What an institutional licence actually says
Photo libraries run by tourist boards and local authorities exist to promote a destination. Their standard licence therefore allows destination-promotion use, often subject to prior approval, and almost always excludes two things:
- digital commercial use, meaning anything that contributes to selling a product or a service, including a hotel or restaurant brochure site;
- transfer to a third party, meaning passing the files to anyone other than the named beneficiary of the permission.
The second point is the one that catches agencies out. Even where a use is permitted for your own organisation, it is not permitted on behalf of your client. Yet that is exactly what a web designer does: download an image, put it in a site, deliver the site to someone else. Technically, the image changes hands.
Why nobody gets caught (until they do)
In practice the immediate risk is low. Institutional libraries do not actively police regional websites, and images circulate. The problem shows up later, and rarely at a convenient moment:
- during a compliance review, when the client bids for public-sector work or raises funding and is asked to evidence the rights on its visuals;
- during a sale of the business, where intellectual property in marketing material is systematically examined;
- when the client decides to print a campaign from the website visuals, and someone notices the missing mandatory credit.
In all three cases it is the agency that delivered the work that is in breach, not the photo library. Service contracts almost always state that the supplier warrants it holds the rights to the elements it incorporates.
What a licence designed for agency work changes
A licence that is genuinely useful to an agency has to state three things explicitly:
- commercial use is allowed, with no distinction between print and digital;
- the image may be used in a deliverable produced for a third party;
- that third party keeps the right to exploit the image after the relationship with the agency ends.
The third point is the one most often missing. A licence that allows use “for your clients” but expires when your subscription does leaves your client with a website whose images become irregular the day you stop paying. That is legally awkward and commercially untenable.
That is the reason our Agency licence exists: the transfer to the end client is perpetual and covers the identified deliverable. You can cancel; your client keeps their site.
What about editorial images?
Some images in this catalogue are marked “editorial use only”. This is not a disguised commercial restriction: it means an identifiable person appears without a signed release, or a location requiring a shooting permit has not granted one. Using them to sell something would expose your client to a personality-rights claim, quite separately from copyright.
They remain published and useful : for an article, a press pack, an informational piece - but they are excluded from high-resolution downloads under the Pro and Agency plans, and the site says so on every page concerned rather than in a footnote.