Photo and Stock Agencies Editing and Proofreading Services

A photograph carries no information about itself. Everything a user needs — who is in it, where it was taken, when, whether it can be used commercially, whether the person in it agreed to be there — exists only in text an agency writes and attaches. That text is also the entire discovery mechanism: an unfindable image earns nothing, and a mislabelled one earns money right up to the moment it appears in a campaign it was never cleared for.

We edit what photo agencies, picture libraries and archives produce — captions and extended captions for news and editorial images, keyword and metadata schemes, controlled vocabularies for subjects, places and events, licence descriptions distinguishing editorial from commercial use, model and property release documentation and its plain-language explanation, restriction notes and territory limitations, credit and attribution requirements, contributor agreements and royalty explanations, submission and technical specification guidance, archive description for historical collections, guidance on describing people and communities in captions, and rights-clearance correspondence. Our editors treat the caption as the product it is.

The news caption carries the highest risk in the whole operation, because it is a factual claim published under the agency's name and reproduced verbatim by every outlet that licenses the picture. The failures are consistent: identifying someone as a participant when they were a bystander, describing a crowd's purpose from the photographer's assumption, dating an image to the day it was filed rather than shot, and — the expensive one — a caption written for one story that is reused when the image resurfaces years later in a different context. We write these so the caption states only what is visible and what the photographer recorded at the scene, so anything supplied by a third party is attributed within the caption itself, so date, location and event are given at the precision actually known rather than rounded up, and so any restriction travels in the same field as the description. We also make the caption work when detached from the story it was shot for, since that is the condition in which most of the damage happens.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unreleased images, contributor terms and rights correspondence. We are editors rather than lawyers or picture researchers, and we offer no view on copyright, releases, privacy or licensing risk. What we can do is make captions accurate and self-sufficient, and metadata consistent enough that the right image is found by the right buyer.