If you’ve been doing photography or video for long enough, you’re likely to come across a client who’s going to ask for the raw files or footage from a project. So, should you give your clients the raw files? My simple answer is, you should never give away raw files for free. The core of this debate is copyright and your rights as the copyright holder of the images or footage. (I’ll take more about this later)

The reason you should never give away raw files for free requires a bit of a history lesson. Being in today’s digital world, giving away raw files or footage seems like no big deal. But if we take a small trip back in time, you’ll begin to have a better understanding of why giving away raw files is such a big deal.

Before everything became digital, raw files or footage was stored on a physical material. If you were taking pictures, that physical material was film negatives. If you were doing video, that physical material was film reels or vhs tapes. But now with everything being digital, that physical material is data. Think about it this way, before when you would give away raw files, you had to give the client either the negatives or the tapes themselves.

So if you find yourself in this situation, what do you do? Well the answer can be tricky depending on the client and the job. In short you’re probably going to have to educate your client to some degree and find a way to say no without being rude or dismissive. One thing to remember that can give you some confidence in handling this situation is that when a client hires you for a project, they’re usually hiring you for a finished product. If they wanted the raw files and footage, that’s something that’s discussed up front.

How Much to Charge for Raw Files?

I’m not saying to never give away the raw files, that’s a judgement call. What I suggest for a client asking for raw footage is to offer to sell them to them at a premium. How much to charge for raw files? I say 3 to 10 times the cost of a finished project. Why so much? As I stated before, back in the day if a client asked you for the raw files, they really would be asking you for the film negatives. If you give away your negatives, they’re never coming back and that’s potential lost revenue for you in the future. A few ways that you can lose revenue is, they take your raw files, edit them in a way that makes you look bad and still give you the credit, which could damage your reputation. Another way is, being that you don’t have the “negatives” anymore, you can’t take those images and add them to your portfolio in the future.

Remember the real business of photography isn’t so much taking and giving people pictures, you’re selling them the use rights of those pictures. This can be a difficult concept for smaller clients to understand. Bigger clients understand this concept and are fully aware of usage rights. Usage rights basically gives the client the right to use that image in a certain way, be it for magazine ads, social media ads, print work, etc. You as the copyright holder set the terms of how they can use that image. Remember any image that you take with your camera and your equipment is your copyright, it doesn’t matter that the client paid you. Now if you’re just a shooter or camera man on a production the client funded and provided all the equipment for, that’s a whole different story. This is also known as work for hire.

What to Say When Clients ask for Raw Footage?

To sum it up, this can be a difficult conversation to have with clients, especially if you’ve been working with them for a long time. Although at the end of the day, you have to protect your work and your reputation. Most photographers getting into the business of photography don’t really understand the actual business of photography, which admittedly takes time to learn if you don’t have someone to teach you. A great way to learn is with stock photography. Doing micro stock photography for sites like shutterstock.com can give you a mini lesson as to how you can sell licenses to your images and make residual and passive income from selling that license over and over again.