It arrived on a Tuesday. A formal legal notice from a rights management company, informing me that an image on the blog was being used without a licence, and that I had fourteen days to either produce proof of a valid licence or pay a settlement fee.
I did not have a licence. I had an attribution. The two things, I discovered very quickly, are not the same.
The Mistake
The image in question had been sourced from a news article. I had credited it correctly, named the photographer, linked to the original source, done everything I understood attribution to mean. What I had not done was obtain permission to use it. In copyright law, those are entirely different actions. Attribution tells people where something came from. Licensing gives you the right to use it.
This is a distinction that a significant number of bloggers and small website owners do not understand until they receive an email like the one I received. I was one of them.
The image came down immediately. That part was straightforward. What was less straightforward was the realisation that the same mistake might exist elsewhere across a blog with several hundred posts, many of them illustrated with images sourced from news articles, press releases, and websites over several years of daily publishing.
The Audit
Going through several hundred blog posts looking for potentially unlicensed images is not a quick afternoon’s work. It is the kind of task that consumes the day you had planned for something else and leaves you with a list of problems to solve rather than a solved problem.
What became clear during the audit was that a significant proportion of the images used across the older posts were not from sources that could be confirmed as free to use. Some were from Unsplash, which is fine. Others were from news sources, Wikipedia, press materials, and various other places where the licensing status was either unclear or clearly not covered.
The safest approach was to remove any image where the licensing could not be confirmed and replace it. All of them. Across every post where the source was uncertain.
That is a lot of images to replace.
The Problem With Stock Photography
The obvious solution would be to replace everything with stock photography from a reputable free source. Unsplash has excellent photography. Pexels, Pixabay, similar platforms. The problem is finding the right image for every post.
A daily blog covering topics as varied as Stoic philosophy, ocean plastic policy, Welsh farming practices, and the GSM weight of organic cotton does not always have an obvious photographic equivalent. Some posts are easy. Many are not. Spending twenty minutes searching for the right stock photograph for every post that needs one is not a viable use of time when you are also running a business.
This is where a different approach became necessary.
The Unexpected Solution
AI image generation has been available for a while, but I had resisted using it on the blog for reasons that felt principled at the time. The brand has a strong commitment to authenticity and transparency. AI generated imagery felt like a step away from that.
The copyright problem forced a reconsideration. Not of the principle, but of the application.
What emerged from that reconsideration was a visual style that has turned out to work better for the blog than stock photography ever did. A simple watercolour illustration style, loosely sketched, plain white background, subject centred, no clutter. Generated using Midjourney with a consistent prompt formula that produces images recognisable as part of the same visual language.
The style suits the blog in ways that photography often did not. A Stoic post about the nature of time does not have an obvious photograph. A loosely sketched hourglass on a white background works perfectly. A post about soil health does not have a stock photo that captures the argument. A watercolour cross-section of earth and roots does.
Every AI generated image on the blog is labelled as such. That was non-negotiable. The commitment to transparency is not suspended because the image generation was convenient.
What I Learned
Attribution is not licensing. If you are running a blog and sourcing images from anywhere other than platforms explicitly offering free commercial use, you need to check the licensing terms. Not the caption. Not the credit. The actual terms under which the image can be used.
The image databases that pursue these claims are sophisticated and systematic. They search the web continuously for unlicensed use of their clients’ images. Being a small blog in Wales does not make you invisible to them. Being a hobbyist rather than a commercial operation does not exempt you from copyright law.
Remove any image you cannot confirm the licence for. Do it now, before the email arrives, not after.
And if you find yourself needing to replace a large number of images in a short time, the visual consistency of a single illustrated style turns out to be considerably more distinctive than a collection of unrelated stock photographs ever was.
The email that arrived on a Tuesday turned out to change something for the better. That was not obvious at the time.
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