The web runs on pictures, and a great many sites treat other people’s photographs as if they were free for the taking. CyclingFreePress does not. This page explains where our images come from, what we will and will not use, and how to reach us if you own an image and believe it has appeared here without your permission.
Two commitments
- We do not use anyone else’s media without a licence or the owner’s express consent. That covers photographs, video, graphics, and audio. If we cannot show a clear right to use an image — a free licence, a public-domain status, or direct permission from the owner — we do not publish it.
- We do not subscribe to the big commercial photo agencies. Services such as Getty Images and the specialist cycling wires charge licensing fees that run to sums a small independent site cannot justify, and we have chosen not to build the site on them. Everything you see here comes from freely licensed, public-domain, or officially provided sources instead.
What we will not do
The most common way small sites get into trouble is by lifting an agency photograph — Getty, Cor Vos, AFP, or a race organizer’s own frames — from another outlet and re-hosting it with a “via” credit line. A credit line is not a licence. Naming the photographer does not grant permission to publish the picture; if anything it documents that we knew who owned it. So we do not do it. We also do not hotlink, scrape, or copy images from other cycling publishers’ articles.
Where our images actually come from
When a post carries a photograph, it comes from one of these sources:
- Wikimedia Commons — our default. We use files that carry a named author and a clear free licence (Creative Commons CC BY or CC BY-SA) or that are in the public domain (CC0), and we skip anything with a vague or missing author.
- Creative Commons material elsewhere, such as Flickr photos released under a CC licence, used within that licence’s terms.
- Official press and media rooms operated by teams and race organizers, used according to the terms they set for editorial use.
- Embedded social posts — where we point to an official rider, team, or organizer post on a platform such as Instagram or X, the image stays hosted by that platform. We are linking to it, not copying it onto our own server.
How we credit
Free licences come with a small set of obligations, and we honour them. For every Creative Commons image we publish we credit the author by name, link to the specific licence, and note it if we have altered the file (a crop, for example). The credit line appears with the image. Placing a licensed photograph next to our own writing does not make the writing a derivative of the photograph; the licence attaches to the picture, and that is where we meet it.
Why we don’t pay for a stock library
A commercial agency subscription would add a recurring cost out of all proportion to what this site is, and it would not make the journalism any better. CyclingFreePress stands on its reporting and its links, not on its photographs — an article is worth reading, and ranks, because of its text. A well-chosen public-domain col shot, an official route map, a freely licensed race photo, or a simple title card does the job a hero image needs to do. Spending heavily to license agency frames would be paying a premium for polish we can get honestly and for free.
If you own an image on this site
We take this seriously and we would rather hear from you than not. If you are the rights holder of an image that appears on CyclingFreePress and you believe it is here without proper permission, or the credit is wrong, email editor@cyclingfreepress.com with a link to the page and the image in question. We will remove or correct it promptly while we verify — we do not argue first and check later.
Related
How the rest of the site is produced is set out in our Editorial Policy, and how we handle mistakes — including a wrong or missing image credit — is covered by our Corrections Policy.
Contact
Image and permissions questions: editor@cyclingfreepress.com