Buy Images for Commercial Use or Where to Get Images Licensed to Print on T-Shirts?
Stock photos are a great resource to save time and money in creating visuals for marketing, advertising, branding, social media presence, etc. But what if you want images you can print on t-shirts (or any other item) for series production and sell them to make some bucks, but you can't shoot your own photos? Well, you can use stock images. All you've to do is purchase images for commercial use, under an Extended License agreement.
Don't be put off by how complicated it sounds: it's dead simple. An Extended License is the same Royalty-Free license you use for every other project, only adding the necessary rights to use the pictures in products for resale, and unlimited copies.
So, when do you need an Extended License? Where to buy stock photos for commercial use? How much will they cost you? Read on as we answer all these questions one by one and find a list of stock agencies with a focus on commercial usage, below!
Quick advice: you can get images for commercial use at the lowest price in the market with Stockphots.com's Extended License packs, or if you need a larger collection check out Shutterstock's offer here.
Best 4 Stock Photo Offers: Prices for Extended Licenses
| Agency | Price per Photo with Smallest Investment | Best Price per Photo |
|---|---|---|
| SPS Shop | $80 / $40 for members | $44 / $22 for members |
| iStock | $192 | $152 |
| Shutterstock | $99,50 | $68 |
| Adobe Stock | $79,99 | $79,99 |
Quick Guide to Buy Stock Photos for Commercial Use
First of all, let's make clear here we are talking about images under the Royalty-Free license, which gives you a number of preset rights for a one-time fee, letting you use the photos forever in as many designs as you want.
Now, stock photos under this license can be used for commercial purposes (the agency makes sure to check all rights are cleared for such use). Standard licenses (the default one at pretty much every agency) cover the use of photos in any commercial design that doesn't involve selling the image repeatedly and directly. Marketing campaigns, adverts, banners, websites, blogs, social media posts –like Facebook posts, Instagram stories, etc.– store decoration, and more are typical commercial image licensing uses. Giving credit to the artist isn't required, and you can edit and modify the images as much as you want.
The main restrictions in this license are the number of copies you can distribute (commonly set at 500,000 units), and the prohibition to use photos in products or designs you will then resell for a profit.
What is a Commercial Extended License?
You can click here for detailed info on Extended Licenses and practical examples of their uses. But simply put, it's an upgraded version of the Royalty-Free license. As its name gives away, it extends the usage rights you get, removing certain limitations of the Standard license and adding some very useful rights. It is also a one-time payment model: you pay once and gain usage rights forever.
Extended License usually adds two very important rights:
- Unlimited print run
- Use in products for resale
When you buy images under an Extended License, they are commercial-use photos that you can legally include in products you repeatedly sell to multiple clients. And you don't have to worry about the production run, as you can use the image in unlimited reproductions.
These are bought similar to how you would a standard stock photo: sign up for a customer account on a stock imagery website, choose the desired picture(s), select the Extended licensing option instead of Standard, then finish up by uploading the payment information, and finally clicking on the download button.
When Do I Need an Extended License?
As you likely guessed, you're going to need an Extended License when:
- You intend to distribute more than the Standard limit of copies (even if it's not for reselling purposes)
- You want to use the photo in a design that will be reproduced and sold for a profit (be it in physical or digital products)
If you're looking for images for designs created to print on t-shirts, hats, mugs, posters, etc., then you definitely need to purchase images for commercial use with an Extended License.
Tip: In some agencies, you would need Extended licensing for certain uses that others cover in standard. Things like videos for streaming services or TV or film, for example. Here you can see the best stock photo licensing agreements compared with all the relevant info.
When you Don't Need an Extended License!
- Blog posts or website
- Social Media
- Online Marketing
- Images for Personal Use
- Affiliate Promotion
- eBooks
- Limited Print Runs
What is the Best Source for Buying Images for Commercial Use?
As we said, many stock photo agencies include Extended Licenses in their offer. In pretty much all cases, this license can be acquired on-demand, but not with subscriptions.
Here we bring you a list of the best places for downloading stock photos for for-profit usage with an Extended License. Most of these agencies are also among our Best Stock Photo Sites ever. Have a quick look at their amazing prices!
Buy Images for Commercial Use – The Best 5 Offers
Stockphotos.com – Lets you use photos for commercial products
Stockphotos.com is a stock photo site thought specifically for small to medium businesses, with very cheap deals on high-quality images. Here you can buy photos for commercial usage with one of the best offers on the market!
The shop has a collection of 8+ million images and vectors to choose from, all up to XXL size at no added cost. Plus, hundreds of thousands of new files are added every month. Search and finding the perfect picture will not be a problem! Having popular deals in annual subscriptions like the excellent Club Easy, plus on-demand single image purchase and image packs, this agency includes great Extended License packs that let you purchase stock images for commercial use, including products for resale.
The Extended License price starts at $70 for one image for $80, and then there are packs of 5 images for $280, 25 for $1,000, and 50 for $1,900. Now, these prices are very competitive, but what's even best is that there's a 50% discount on any pack for subscribers to any of their Club annual subscriptions! That's right, if you have an annual subscription to Stockphotos.com, you will be able to buy Extended License packs with commercial-use images at half price. Plus, the packs never expire, you can buy them and use them whenever you want. Getting to as low as just $19 per photo, it's by far the cheapest image license offer in the market! You can learn more details about Extended License packs here.
Get your Extended License pack at Stockphotos.com today! And don't forget to check the annual Club offers for awesome cheap photos and 50% off on Extended Licenses! This is a good place to start! Especially because our exclusive Stockphotos.com coupon now gives you 10 extra images on your subscription at no added cost!
For more info, make sure to read our Stockphotos.com review.
Shutterstock
One of the most popular stock media agencies in the business, Shutterstock offers Royalty Free images at super low pricing for both for-profit and editorial use. When it comes to images for commercial use, they include an Extended License (what they call an Enhanced license) in their service at reasonable price points.
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Shutterstock has one of the largest image collections in the industry with over 400 million photos, vectors, and illustration files. They offer subscriptions and image packs, and when it comes to Extended License they're available on-demand, also in pack form where the more images users buy in advance, the more they save in the long run.
Their Enhanced License packs aka photos for commercial usage are at $199 for 2 images, $449 for 5, and $1699 for 25. Depending on how many you want to buy, they'll cost you between $68 and $99.50 each. The packs are valid for one year after the purchase date, so you have a lot of flexibility to invest and use your commercial-use photos.
Sign up for free at Shutterstock to buy their Enhanced Image packs! And if you want to get them cheaper, use our special Shutterstock Coupon Code with up to 20% Off!
iStock – purchase extended licenses from one of the best agencies
One of the oldest established and most popular stock photo agencies in the industry, iStock specializes in royalty-free images for commercial use. They offer a carefully curated library full of these images, and they include Extended License options with added usage rights including resale of products.
iStock offers millions of photos and illustrations curated into two main collections, one economic and the other exclusive. You can get these images with a subscription, or on-demand with credits. Extended Licenses are available with credits only, and each bonus permission comes as a separate license.
All Extended License options are 18 credits each (depending on the pack you buy, this will be between $144 and $170). Physical Products are the label of the option for products for resale, and there are also Unlimited Reproduction, Multi-Seat and other alternatives. It's important to note each of these options adds 18 credits to the individual image price, which is either 1 or 3 credits depending on the collection. Like this, a photo for printing on a t-shirt or any other item can cost you roughly from $152 to $192. Considering this agency offers premium, exclusive images, and high-quality budget photos, it's a very reasonable deal.
Sign up for free at iStock to get awesome images for your t-shirt designs!
And we have excellent news: for a limited time, we offer you an exclusive iStock Promo Code with 15% off in EVERYTHING! You can buy credit packs (to get Extended Licenses and everything else) at super cut-price and also subscriptions with this great discount! This offer is available to all customers, but only for a limited time, so don't miss it!
Adobe Stock
Adobe Stock is Adobe's very own stock photo brand, which is deeply integrated into its Creative Cloud platform providing a seamless workflow for designers using stock photos. Their offer is complete with an Extended License, and you can buy images for commercial use at convenient pricing points.
Adobe Stock has over 90 million files in its library, all royalty-free images for commercial use. They have subscription plans with many options, and also credit packs for bonus content. All their photos have an Extended license (called Enhanced) available, which gives you the right to unlimited print run and use in products to be resold.
Their Enhanced license is priced at just $79,99 per photo, and you pay as you go. It's a very simple and straightforward system that lets you get just as many images as you need, whenever you need them.
Explore Adobe Stock's collections for free! If you want to test their service, seize this Adobe Stock Free Trial with 10 standard images for free!
Canva Pro
Canva is a user-friendly design platform where you can create virtually any visual content you need, easily and with beautiful results. Canva Pro is the premium version of the service, which you can access via a montly or annual paid membership.
As part of its offer, the platform has millions of stock photos, illustrations, graphics, videos, and more that you can use in your designs. The free version has a limited selection and Canva Pro has an extensive catalog, but both are unlimited, meaning you can download as many images as you wish. Get more details on the service in our Canva Pro review.
All Canva Pro images come under the Canva Pro license, which is royalty-free and one-use-only. And here comes the best part: this license covers the use of pictures in certain products for resale, such as postcards, prints, or posters, at no added cost –therefore, you don't need an extended license for this use, like you do at other agencies. Here you can learn it all about the Canva Pro license.
Best of all, Canva Pro has very affordable, flat fees. You can get unlimited downloads of images and full access to the editing features for only $6.49 a month, and save even more with an annual plan which, at $54.99 per year, only costs $4.60 per month. By far, the lowest rates for images to use in print items for resale. For more information, read our Canva Pro pricing analysis.
Commercial Usage of Photos FAQ
What does commercial use mean for photos?
In stock photography, the term “commercial use” usually means two different things.
1. That you can use the images in designs connected with a for-profit activity (marketing and advertising, for example). This is covered by most standard licenses.
2. That you can use the pictures as part of products that you will then sell for a profit (such as stamped on a sweatshirt, for example). This kind of use tends to be available with an extended license only.
Can I use my photos for commercial use?
Yes, as long as the license specifically covers it. If you want to use your photos in products for resale and you have an extended license that covers it, you are in the clear.
Can I use free images for commercial use?
Depends. Free stock photos are still licensed. If the contract for usage permits it, you should be able to use free stock images in products for resale.
However, free photos are tricky. When you visit a free stock photo platform you notice that most of them work with Creative Commons licenses, and a minority of them have images under the public domain. But almost none police the content to make sure all rights (such as copyright and model releases) have been clearer. So legally free photos aren't very safe for this kind of use.
Licensing Images for Commercial Use: Cost-Effective Way to Make Money from Your Designs!
Being a one-time fee license that grants you perpetual use of the images, buying stock photos for commercial use with an Extended License is a very cost-effective way to create amazing designs to print on t-shirts, hats, mugs, and any other apparel or physical item you can then sell to make a profit.
The costs are really low: at any of the above-listed companies, you can buy photos for commercial use for less than $100.
By far, the best deal is that of Stockphotos.com, with the cheapest Extended Licenses to buy images for commercial use in the market at just $19 per photo. Purchase your Extended License image pack today!
If I am trying to make a T-shirt to sell on a Shopify store, do I need to purchase a license for commercial use of an image or will I be okay using a stock royalty-free image?
You need to buy an extended license for the graphics/images you want to print on the shirt to sell via your Shopify store. Make sure to produce the tshirts first and then start selling them. I hope that helps.
I would like to purchase a stock photo and then edit that photo — e.g. A photo of cocktail — eliminate the background, and make it look like a watercolor. Then, use that image for designs in my on-demand shop (printful) How do you recommend I navigate this? Will the extended comm license typically allow this?
Hi Mel, that sounds like a “normal” extended license for me which most stock agencies should cover. Always ask beforehand for your specific usage because some of them might not allow heavy editing. But it should be OK for most of the stock agencies. Also check beforehand if you need a print-on-demand or extended license (i.e. do you buy and download before production or buy only after production of t-shirts). I hope that helps.
Hi, I am hoping you can give advice. I have created a digital product, incorporating royalty free images from pexels and unsplash for example. I plan on selling these files as a PDF file? Is this allowed?
Hi Marie. thank you for your question. You are mentioning that you want to use images from these free stock photo websites. We can not recommend using those files to create a product for resale. Why? Mainly because the rights of anything on the image are not cleared. This means that neither have the people on these images signed any model release which confirms that you can use these images commercially nor have anyone checked for any logos or recognizable other copyrighted items. We can only suggest buying some proper checked and model-released stock photos from a stock agency that does all the due diligence. I can not recommend using images from free stock photo sites for that matter. I hope that helps.
Why do all photo platforms have the monopoly on damn every photos, pictures, and images.
You can still shoot your own photos or create your own images.
We are planning to print licensed photos on fabric from one of these platforms and sell them on demand. Probably with slight editing. We would like to have about 20-30 options for clients. Is it possible to buy the extended rights once a client selects an image for the first time so we aren’t buying 30 Extended licenses for images that don’t ever get selected/purchased? So if we had a storefront with images to browse for clients. Do we need that extended license yet? Thanks so much for the feedback.
Hi Bill, thank you for your question. That actually is a bit of an issue with most stock agencies. They either have their extended licenses option or a print-on-demand (API) connection which let you build your own store. This means you can not just use all their images on display and then print-on-demand with your customer with the extended license. The extended license is not meant for that. It is meant to pick the design and then produce products. If you really want to build a print-on-demand store, then simply contact us to get info how to integrate our images into your shop. You then only pay us if a customer picks an image. But you would need to do the integration work on your end. Does this makes more sense? Happy to give you some more infos.
Hello Amos, was thinking about starting my own clothing brand and incorporating my own picture for it to be distinct. For this to happen, I found out on google that when you select images (after you have what you intend to search) when tools and clicking on then usage rights, it gives you the option between Creative Common Licenses and Commercial and other licenses, from research I have been informed that Creative Common License is a license issued by the copyright owner to allow anyone in the world to use his or her copyright work in any manner consistent with that license. Does that mean I can copy and paste images on my clothing when selecting on this option.
Hi Darnell, I’ll answer this by parts.
1. Google does NOT license images, they cannot do it because they don’t own it. Google merely aggregates images to their search engine, and the “usage rights” tab helps you identify whether the image you are looking at is copyrighted or not, and in case it is, what kind of licenses are available to use it. So, Google isn’t really giving you options for license, they’re just showing you what licenses is possible to get –from an authorized source– for said image. This is very important.
2. You are correct in that a Creative Commons license is essentially a permission issued by the copyright owner granting an end user rights to use their work for free. However, there are a variety of Creative Commons licenses and not all of them allow the kind of use you intend (which is commercial use in products for resale).
3. You can never “copy and paste” nor “right-click download” an image from the web onto a design/product of yours. Copying and pasting isn’t licensing. In order to legally and safely use someone else’s image that you found online (be it for free or paid) you need to use the download button at the source website’s image page. A license is commonly issued automatically with your download, and it becomes your proof of licensing.
4. Creative Commons licenses –or other forms of free-use licenses– are not a very safe choice when your intended use is commercial. Unless you are downloading from the artist’s verified, personal website, it is almost impossible to certify that a) the person who put the image under creative commons is the actual copyright owner, b) if the image depicts recognizable people, it’s equally difficult to verify that they’ve signed model releases. If any of those conditions isn’t true, the license is invalid and you as a user would be liable.
We always recommend acquiring royalty free licenses for commercial use, in this case you would need an extended license. But if you want to use Creative Commons (or other forms of free-use licenses) make sure to do your due diligence regarding the image and license background before using.
Hope this helps! PS: Check out the extended license offer at Stockphotos.com here!