This page is an entry in the Key.

“contract” vs. “non-contract”
image providing organizations

(Both types of organizations can use TTG)

  • “contract” image-providing organizations
    (Those who have a trusting relationship with most or all of their contributing photographers)

    This is any image-providing organization that has a formal or informal agreement — and thus an existing level of trust and understanding — with its contributing photographers, many of whom are regular contributors.

    These trusted contributors could be familiar and local (staff, freelance, and volunteer photographers) or unfamiliar and remotely located (e.g., photographers who are overseas but work for a trusted image agency).

    The most common example of a “contract” image-provider would be a trusted newspaper, of any size.

  • “non-contract” image-providing organizations
    (Those who don't have a trusting relationship with most or all of their contributing photographers)

    This is any image-providing organization that does NOT have a formal or informal agreement with a regular pool of photographers...

    . . . but instead obtains most of the photos it publishes from unfamiliar photographers who do not work for a trusted image agency and with whom it does not have an existing level of trust and understanding.

    Examples of “non-contract” image providers would include social-media platforms as well as any magazines, websites, and photo contests that receive the photographs they publish from a wide variety of photographers, many of whom are submitting to them for the first time.

    • Both benefit from TTG, but in different ways:

  • Contract-image-providing organizations don’t need to signal their TTG-related expectations; they already trust the photographers supplying their photos.

    They can simply identify any TTG-qualified photos as they publish them—

    — for example, with a single notation saying “Except as noted, all staff photographs in our news section are guaranteed TTG-qualified by the respective photographers.”

  • Non-contract-image-providing organizations can signal their openness to publishing TTG-qualified photos by declaring that they are a TTG-ready provider—

    — knowing that any photographer who submits photos will already know what to expect from them.

    On being a TTG-ready provider