Image Licensing and Copyright
Last updated: September 18, 2026
David Stella Photography creates every photograph on this site and in every gallery we deliver. This page explains who owns those images, what you can do with them, and how to license one if you are not a session client.
Copyright
We retain the copyright to all photographs we create, including images delivered to clients, images published on this site, and images shared on social media. Copyright is not transferred by a session, a purchase, or a download.
What session clients receive
Clients who book a session receive a personal use license to the delivered images from that session. It is perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, and included in your session fee. You may print the images for yourself, your family, and as gifts, share them with family and friends, post them on your personal social media, and use them as a profile photo or in a personal announcement such as a save the date or a birth announcement.
What the personal use license does not cover
Selling the images or licensing them to anyone else. Using them to advertise, promote, or sell any product or service, including your own business. Submitting them to contests, stock libraries, or publications. Editing them, including cropping, filtering, recoloring, or applying presets, since the edit is part of the work. Removing or altering the copyright and creator information embedded in the file. Using them to train, fine-tune, or evaluate machine learning or generative AI systems. If you would like to do any of these, just ask. Most requests are straightforward and many are free.
Credit
Credit is appreciated whenever an image is shared publicly and required when an image is used by a business. Please credit David Stella Photography and, where the platform supports it, link to davidstellaphotography.com or tag @davidstellaphotography.
Venues, vendors, and wedding professionals
Venues, planners, florists, and other vendors who appear in or contributed to a shoot may request a license for portfolio and social media use. These are usually granted at no cost, in writing, in exchange for credit. Using an image in paid advertising, on a pricing or booking page, in printed marketing, or in any submission made in the vendor’s own name requires a written license first. Please ask before using an image. A request takes a minute and avoids an awkward conversation later.
Publications, editorial, and commercial use
Magazines, blogs, brands, and agencies can license images for editorial or commercial use. Terms depend on where the image runs, for how long, and at what scale. Send us the image, the intended use, the placement, and the duration, and we will quote.
Model and property releases
A personal use license is not a model release. Images that include identifiable people may require additional permission before they can be used commercially, and that permission is separate from anything on this page.
Rights information inside our files
Our files carry IPTC copyright and creator information embedded in them, identifying David Stella Photography as the copyright holder and pointing back to this page. Stripping that information from a file is not permitted, and on many platforms it also violates their terms.
Unlicensed use
If you find one of our images being used without a license, or if you are already using one and were not aware of these terms, contact us. We would much rather sort it out directly than escalate it.
Contact
David Stella Photography david@davidstellaphotography.com (321) 475-7792