Royalty-Free (RF) licensing has been called the "scourge" and the "death" of the industry. RF is a very vague, general use license that allows the purchaser to use the image however they want as long as they don't resell it or transfer the "assignment" of the image. For example, I could buy a CD filled with another photographer's images and re-use the same image from project to project without paying additional licensing.

The spread of RF has led to the re-use of many popular images by multiple companies in the same industry on many occasions. I've seen the same Photodisc images of people of various ethnicities shot against white seamless since the mid 1990s.

Before I verbally crucify the use of RF images, let's analyze why photo buyers like them. First, the license is easy to understand. Buy it, use it however you want. If you've ever tried to get a quote on a rights-managed image, you know how complicated it can be. In many cases, the photographer has no idea how to price the image because pricing is irregular and arbitrary. In other cases, it's difficult to figure out all the parameters. Am I looking for an exclusive use of the image in North America on fewer than 20 billboards for 60 days with a first right of refusal on extending the licensing for a year?

Secondly, RF is cheap. Because RF is not priced by usage, you can get an image for a few hundred dollars and use it for a personal promotion, a website, and a national ad campaign. We are all consumers, and we all are faced with pricing decisions daily. Should I buy the $.99 burger at Wendy's or the $50 kobe beef burger? Some people are willing to pay for exclusivity, even if there are diminishing returns on the high end of the curve. But when brands aren't involved, most people will usually choose the cheaper option.

Often, RF images have no qualities that make them distinctive. How many images of a rubber ducky shot on white seamless have you seen? Does it matter if it was taken by Avedon (not a noted product photographer, btw) or some photo student? For purposes of stock imagery, the answer is overwhelmingly "no." I am unwilling to pay a premium for a generic image, even if it's taken by a name-brand photographer.

So therein lies the rub. We can't assume that all subject matter in all settings has an equal value as rights-managed imagery. And because photographers, even good ones(!), are in overabundance, the photographer is at a distinct disadvantage in what is a buyer's market. The buyer doesn't care about you making a living. He/She only cares about getting a good value.

RF will never go away, so we have to learn how to live with it. I personally believe that some images, like the rubber ducky, need to be licensable with a pricing model that is somewhere between RF and rights-managed. One possible solution: A one-time use license that doesn't take size or circulation into account.

Photographers who complain about RF are like the record labels that complain about file swapping. File swapping occurs because of the simplicity and convenience of the model. The Internet has allowed and almost mandated that dealing with digital assets be easy. Consumers will continue to seek RF until we personally educate every single one of them, or more realistically, until we find an easier way to price and distribute rights-managed imagery.

If you don't know it by now, you will soon enough: Your existence is threatened. Maybe you are a professional photographer with a digital camera. Or maybe you're a "traditional" shooter, scanning your film, and spending hours meticulously retouching each image to make the perfect digital files. But either way, archiving your life's work has been reduced to stuffing as many bits of data as possible onto the magnetized platters of a hard drive, or the pitted plastic of a DVD.

In 2002, you said that you'd never use a CF card bigger than 512MB because you couldn't fathom losing so many images. In 2003, you said you'd never use a CF card bigger than 1GB because the thought of losing more than a gig's worth of images was incomprehensible. In 2005, you frequently shoot with a 2GB or 4GB card.

You spend thousands of dollars on your high-tech gear, but ironically when your computer's hard drive runs out of space, you search for the cheapest external drive you can find to back up your images.

Nowadays, you can find drives with enormous capacities for $1 per GB. However, drives are still mechanical devices, and Murphy's Law says they will break at the most inopportune time. The more drives you have, the higher the risk of experiencing a failure. (Those of you that have been around for a while, and had a Western Digital Caviar, are well aware that the failure rate was much higher than advertised).

You might not consciously realize it, but when you create a back-up on an external hard drive or DVD, what you're really doing is mitigating risk. The more copies you have of an image, the less of a chance that a single loss will be disastrous. But using unproven archiving media (like DVD) is a crapshoot with questionable long-term value, and as your archive grows, you create a management nightmare for yourself. If you shoot 500GB/year and burn two DVDs of every image, you're already dealing with 175 DVDs per year.

You might already have RAID, but RAID is useless if you don't replace the bad drives quickly. I personally have seen RAID systems that have had two drives fail within a week, causing catastrophic data loss. And if you are monitoring your systems vigilantly, you're likely spending more time than you want being a system administrator rather than a photographer.

So here's the digital threat: Five years from now, your life's work will be represented by a series of 1's and 0's, and if you don't find a way to deal with the stack of DVDs and 27 hard drives in your closet, your existence as a professional photographer will be in jeopardy.

Hard drives will continue to get cheaper and denser, but unless there is a fundamental shift in technology, the drives will keep breaking at the same rate. And the more you have, the more failure you'll be exposed to. By contrast, your Internet connection will get faster and cheaper. So how will you store your images in the future?

I've introduced PhotoShelter to a few people only to hear "Why would I want to do that when I can get a 1TB hard drive for $1000?" This sounds like a reasonable argument, but as any homeowner or car owner can tell you, the cost of purchasing something is not the cost of owning it. More significantly, PhotoShelter isn't just a hard drive, it is an archiving system -- part redundant storage, part digital asset management, part automated, online sales tool. So let's compare apples with apples.

Lacie is a brand that many photographers are familiar with, so we'll use them as a point of comparison. As a former Lacie owner, I can attest to the quality of their brand. They sell a great looking 1.6TB RAID (1.2TB usable) for $1599. (PhotoShelter uses RAID so we're quoting it here)

In order to deal with the potential physical threats (e.g. fire, flood, etc) PhotoShelter has RAID systems in each of two locations around the US, so you'd really need to get two Lacie's. We also have an environmentally controlled datacenter for these RAID systems. Assuming you have two houses with a little room for your RAID, you could get (2) 5500 BTU air conditioners for about $150 each.

To power the RAID (200W each) and the AC units (480W energy star) 24/7/365, would cost you about $2000 at 17 cents per kilowatt hour.

Our data centers come equipped with diesel generators that can power the equipment in the event of a power failure. You could get (2) Honda EU2000i generators for about $1000 a piece. We'll throw the diesel in for free. Two 450W UPSs (uninterruptible power supplies) with 30 minutes of battery life will run about $260 each.

We have multiple Internet connections from our datacenter, and obviously a massive amount of bandwidth. But let's assume that you have (2) DSL lines from each location for $40/month. That's about $1920 annualized. Don't forget hardware-based firewalls at each location ($206 for a Cisco PIX 501). We'll pretend that you're a network security expert, and it took you no time to configure your equipment.

Now in order to see the images sitting on your RAID and make them publicly searchable, you'll need to either commission someone to build a system for you, or you could build it yourself. I'm assuming that since you're a photographer, you have better things to do with your time. But let's say conservatively that you could find a programmer to build you a secure, password protected, fully searchable archive with automated print and online sales in 100 hours for $50/hour. That would be $5,000 (you won't find anyone to do it so cheaply, btw).

Using the figures above, 1TB of storage would cost you $1183/month. Even with a 3-year depreciation model on the capital expenditures, you're still paying $546/month. PhotoShelter sells 1TB for $400/month.

Here's one more pricing comparison for kicks: