Images on your landing page: what the law actually says (stock photo libraries, AI-generated images, personality rights)

A landing page comes together fast: a headline, a promise, a bit of proof, an image up top to set the tone. That very speed is what causes problems with images — they get searched for, found, dropped in, rarely with a check on where they actually came from. But a landing page is a public, indexed page, often boosted with ad spend: it's an easy target for automated stock-photo detection tools, and the first place a client or third party recognizes their own photo. Three families of images cross paths on a sales page — stock libraries, photos of real people, AI-generated images — and each follows different rules.

Stock libraries: free or paid, the license doesn't tell the whole story

Free libraries like Unsplash or Pexels grant a broad license — commercial use allowed, attribution not required in the vast majority of cases. The point that often gets missed: that license covers your use of the image file, not the presence of recognizable people inside it. A stock photo showing an identifiable face is, in theory, supposed to have required that person's consent (a "model release") before the platform allowed it to be published — but nothing guarantees the contributor actually obtained one. Paid libraries (Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, Depositphotos) offer better protection on this specific point: their contracts typically include a contractual guarantee against third-party claims, which isn't a given on the free side.

The real risk almost never comes from the libraries themselves, but from what bypasses them: an image pulled straight out of Google Images results, without going through a licensing platform. Agencies like Getty Images run large-scale image-recognition tools across the web and send demand letters to sites using their photos without a license — with amounts claimed running into the hundreds, sometimes thousands of euros per image, and liability that doesn't disappear even after the image is taken down. This has been a real, well-documented risk for small businesses for over a decade, precisely because nobody in a small team has the reflex to check the source before publishing.

AI-generated images: a legal grey area that cuts both ways

Midjourney, DALL·E or Firefly let you produce a custom image in seconds, which makes them an increasingly common choice for landing page visuals. The issue isn't so much a lawsuit risk — these models generally don't "copy" an identifiable protected image — as the uncertainty over what you actually own once the image exists. A comparative analysis published in 2025 in the journal Laws by legal scholars Anthi Gaidartzi and Irini Stamatoudi shows that legal systems diverge sharply on this point: most require a human creative contribution for a work to qualify for copyright protection, something generative AI doesn't always meet in the strict sense — leaving ownership of the image in a grey zone depending on whether the prompt writer, the tool's operator, or nobody at all is deemed to hold the rights.

Another study, published in 2023 in Discover Artificial Intelligence by Watiktinnakorn, Seesai and Kerdvibulvech, reaches the same conclusion on a more practical level: without a settled legal framework, an AI-generated image gives its user no guarantee of exclusivity — a competitor can legally produce a near-identical image with the same tool, and you have no right you can enforce to stop them. For a landing page, the practical takeaway is concrete: an AI image works fine for a generic illustration or a decorative background, but it's a poor choice for a visual meant to embody the unique identity of your offer — a logo, a recurring character, a brand visual you might one day want to protect.

Photos of real people: personality rights sit on top of copyright

A founder photo, a screenshot of a client testimonial, a "before/after" photo from a coaching engagement: as soon as a real, identifiable person appears, a second right layers on top of the image-licensing question — personality/image rights. In France, taking a photo of someone in a public place is allowed without their consent; publishing that photo, however, generally requires their consent — ideally in writing — once the person is identifiable and the publication could cause them harm. The rule is stricter still in a private setting (a studio, an office, a client's home), where recording someone's image without consent is a criminal offense, and for a minor, where parental consent is required.

In practice, for a founder photo or a video testimonial, a simple written message confirming the person's agreement to commercial use on your site is enough in the vast majority of cases — but it has to exist, be dated, and be kept on file. The same logic applies to before/after photos: the consent needs to cover the specific commercial use, not just the fact of having been photographed.

Covering yourself without spending hours on it

1. Never save an image directly from search engine results — always go through the original platform (stock library, the client's own account) to know the actual license.
2. Keep proof for every image you publish: a screenshot of the license page, the download date, the source file name. A shared folder is enough — the goal is being able to respond within five minutes if a claim ever arrives.
3. For any photo of an identifiable person (founder, client, team member), get explicit written consent naming the commercial use on the site, not just consent to be photographed.
4. Reserve AI-generated images for generic or decorative visuals, not for elements meant to embody your offer's own identity — see the exclusivity issue above.
5. Never reuse an image found on a competitor's site as-is, including their AI visuals or diagrams — see our article on what the law says about copying a competitor's landing page.
6. If a demand letter arrives (Getty Images or another agency), don't pay in a rush or ignore it: taking the image down doesn't erase liability for the period it was live, and a specialized lawyer will almost always negotiate an amount well below the initial demand.

Where this plays out concretely on your page

On the 10 LanderKit templates (€89 each, €229 for the full pack), the demo images are provided purely to illustrate the layout — they should be replaced with your own visuals before going live, exactly like the placeholder copy. That's the right moment to apply the checklist above: on a Coach & Consultant template (demo), the photo that replaces the placeholder is almost always of an identifiable person — the case most exposed to personality-rights rules. On an e-commerce single-product template (demo), the subject is mostly the product itself: the risk shifts to the license on the product photo, especially when it was supplied by a manufacturer or supplier without clarifying what rights were passed on to the reseller. See also our guide on the technical optimization of images once the rights question is settled, and the legal notices required on a landing page, which include photo credits when the license requires them.