The question usually arrives late, once the site is already built: where do we get the images for your website? Three routes are available, and all three end with a file on the screen. What they do not deliver is the same right in it. With a stock image you rent a permission that comes with conditions. With a generated image you get a file that belongs to nobody, including you. With your own photograph you hold the most, but rarely everything. This piece sorts the three routes by the question that decides matters in the end: who may use the picture, who may stop you using it, and who pays when something goes wrong.
What are you buying when you buy a stock image?
Not the image. You are buying permission to use it within a defined frame. German copyright law calls this a right of use: the author may grant another party the right to use the work for individual or all types of use, on a simple or an exclusive basis, and limited by territory, time and purpose (section 31 UrhG). Austria draws the same two levels as Werknutzungsbewilligung and Werknutzungsrecht (section 24 UrhG). The distinction is not a formality: under the simple licence that virtually every stock portal sells, the identical file may sit on a thousand other sites in parallel, including your competitor's.
The conditions live in the licence, not in the price. Common restrictions: no resale as part of a product, no use in a logo or trade mark, no advertising use for editorial images, and at many portals an obligation to credit the photographer. You also need to be able to prove it. On 12 May 2026 the Celle Court of Appeal confirmed that the chain of title for product photographs has to be documented and that an implied transfer of rights is not enough (13 U 88/25, reported by Kanzlei Plutte on damages in image rights cases). In practice: keep the invoice, the licence text and the download date, not just the file. Anyone asked three years later where an image came from either has the evidence or has a problem.
What does an image cost when you have no right to it?
More than the licence you did not buy, and that is the actual point. Courts calculate by licence analogy: what would reasonable parties have agreed for this use? If the photographer's credit is missing as well, the amount typically doubles. The Federal Court of Justice worked this through on a plain snapshot and awarded 100 euros in licence damages plus another 100 euros for the omitted credit (I ZR 187/17, 13 September 2018; the right to be named as author sits in section 13 UrhG).
In Austria you do not have to rely on case law for this, because the doubling is written into the statute. Anyone who should have obtained consent owes "twice the fee due under section 86" where no greater loss is proven (section 87(3) UrhG). The upper end is open: on 13 November 2025 the Hamburg Regional Court awarded 5,100 euros for architecture photographs used without permission, including a 50 per cent uplift for editing the images (310 O 39/24). Add the cost of the warning letter itself. And the timing is not yours to choose: reverse image search and automated monitoring now find the 2019 subpage too.
Who owns an image an AI produced?
Nobody, at least under the only German ruling on the point so far. Copyright protects personal intellectual creations only (section 2(2) UrhG), and on 13 February 2026 the Munich District Court held that detailed, repeatedly refined prompting does not clear that threshold. The claimant had generated three logos and wanted to stop someone else adopting them. The claim was dismissed: prompting is predominantly technical, instructional work, comparable to commissioning a third party, and the mere selection from several proposals is not sufficient on its own. Time spent and the cost of the tool are legally irrelevant (142 C 9786/25, reported by Kanzlei Plutte).
For your website that means something very concrete: the generated key visual you think of as your brand can be adopted by your competitor, and you have nothing with which to stop them. The Düsseldorf Court of Appeal settled the opposite direction on 2 April 2026. A dog training school had fed a photographer's underwater picture into an AI tool and had it produce a comic-style image. The court found no infringement: the motif and the underlying idea are free, and only the concrete execution of framing, perspective, focus and light is protected (I-20 W 2/26, full text in the North Rhine-Westphalia case law database). Both decisions show the same picture from two sides: protection attaches to human authorship, not to effort and not to the result.
Why is your own photograph not automatically your photograph?
Because two rights attach to a photograph, and neither of them arrives with the bank transfer. The first belongs to the photographer. They remain the author; you receive rights of use to the extent you agreed. An invoice for a shoot is not a licence. Write down what you may use the images for, for how long, in which channels, whether you may edit them, and whether you may pass them to third parties such as a portal or a partner site. Without that, in case of doubt only the purpose of the shoot itself is covered.
The second right belongs to anyone recognisably in the frame. In Germany portraits may in principle only be distributed with consent (section 22 KunstUrhG), in Austria section 78 UrhG protects the portrait, and the Austrian Supreme Court has been clear about staff photographs: putting a picture online without asking and then refusing to remove it violates that right. German case law is more generous on one point and lets a consent once given survive the end of employment, as long as the image is used purely illustratively rather than in an individualising way. You should not build on that subtlety all the same. Two lines in the employment contract, a model release for every recognisable person and a rule for what happens to the pictures on someone's last day are cheaper than any clarification afterwards. How much a genuine photograph carries on a team page is something we worked through in the team page as a sales page.
Which image belongs in which place?
The decision is rarely a matter of taste; it follows the job the place has to do. There are three of them. First, places where the picture is meant to prove something: the team, the workshop, the plant, a finished project, a product in someone's hand. Nothing replaces your own photograph there, because an interchangeable image devalues exactly the claim it is supposed to support. Second, places where the picture only carries mood: blog headers, backgrounds, spacing panels. A stock or generated image is a defensible choice there, provided the licence holds and the labelling fits.
Third, the places that become the brand: the logo, the visual mark, the icon set, a recurring motif people associate with you two years on. That is exactly where a generated image is the worst choice, and not for reasons of taste. It is the one case in which you will later have to defend the image, and after the Munich ruling you have no instrument to do so. Anyone who still wants to generate needs either a recognisable authorial contribution of their own, or a result that serves internally as a reference and is redrawn by a person.
Three levers for the coming weeks
First: build an image register, a single table. One row per image with the file, its place on the site, the source, the licence number or contract, the term, and whether a credit is required. That is an afternoon's work and the only evidence you will have if it ever matters. Start with the pages carrying the most traffic, not in chronological order.
Second: sort out everything that belongs to the brand and was generated. Logo, visual mark, recurring motifs. Either a person turns it into something of their own, or it gets replaced. Both are cheaper today than the moment somebody else uses the same motif and you discover you cannot stop them.
Third: collect the consents and set the deletion rule. A written consent for every recognisable person, plus a fixed routine for what happens when they leave. That costs one form and one line on the offboarding checklist.
If you are not sure which images on your site rest on what basis, we will walk through a register like that with you once and mark the places where replacing something genuinely pays. 📷