Rose-ringed Parakeet, photographed at Sanjay Van, New Delhi, Delhi, India — Rose-ringed Parakeet
Sanjay Van, India · October 2025
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How to license a photo

100% of the money from licensing and print sales goes back into the work. It covers my own airfare, local transportation, lodging and food to get to these projects, and the rest goes back into the communities themselves.

Three steps

Open the photo story you want and press “License this photo.”
Choose the license that fits your use and fill in your details.
You get an email with your PDF license and a download link for the photo. Most licenses are issued automatically within minutes.

Choose your license

1. Non-commercial

free

Who it’s for: individuals, nonprofit organizations, schools, and government or public tourism agencies, when no money changes hands.

Examples: a student using a photo in a school report; a bird club using a photo in its newsletter; a national park agency using a photo in a free visitor guide.

Strictly non-commercial: not for profit, and no money changes hands.
You receive the 960-pixel version.
My photo credit and watermark stay on the photo.
The photo appears exactly as I created it: no cropping, editing or other changes. You may only scale the whole photo evenly to fit your page.
Issued automatically.

Get a free license

2. Commercial, single photo

US$175 per photo, per project

Who it’s for: any business or use that involves money, including a reserve, lodge, hotel or tour operator promoting itself.

Examples: a lodge using a photo on its website; a tour operator running a photo in an ad campaign; a magazine publishing a photo with an article.

One project means one website, one ad campaign, one article or one print edition.
You receive the full-resolution file from my own archive.
No photo credit or watermark required.

License for US$175

3. Commercial, products for sale

priced per unit, minimum US$175

Who it’s for: anyone printing a photo on products they sell.

Examples: a gift shop selling T-shirts or mugs; a company printing a calendar; a publisher printing posters or postcards.

Each unit is priced by tier, so the price never jumps:

Units 1–100: US$5.00 each
Units 101–1,000: US$1.00 each
Units 1,001–10,000: US$0.10 each
Units 10,001–100,000: US$0.05 each
Over 100,000 units: US$0.02 each

Every products license costs at least US$175. For example, 25 T-shirts cost US$175 and 500 mugs cost US$900.

You receive the full-resolution file from my own archive.
No photo credit or watermark required.

Get a price

Conservation partners: apply for a no-cost license

If you worked with me in conservation at the place where a photo was taken, you can apply to have either paid license at no cost. Choose the license that fits your use, tick “I was your conservation partner” on the form, and tell me in a few lines why you’re applying and where the money will go. I read every request and approve it personally.

Example: a conservation partner in Colombia wants to sell T-shirts with my photos and put the money back into the community or into building its foundation. They choose the products-for-sale license, tick the conservation partner box and explain the project.

A no-cost license follows the same rules as the non-commercial license: the 960-pixel version, with my photo credit and watermark kept on and no cropping or editing. If your project needs the full-resolution file, tick “Also request full-resolution files” and tell me why. I decide those requests one by one.

Tell me where the photo appears

Every license has its own number. If you publish a licensed photo on a web page, send me the link to that exact page using the link in your license email. Anyone can check a license number at rainoff.com/license/<number>.

Questions

For anything these licenses don’t cover, email me at adam@rainoff.com.

Would you rather have a print?

If you’d rather hang one of my photos on your wall than use the digital file, you can buy a fine art print from my online store. My prints are made by Pixels.com, which handles all the printing, framing and shipping, so your print reaches you anywhere in the world.

Visit my print store

Copyright

© 2018–2026 Adam Rainoff. All rights reserved. All original content on rainoff.com, including photographs, story text, captions, maps, graphics, video and the original elements of the site’s design, is owned by me, Adam Rainoff, and is protected by the copyright laws of the United States and other countries and by international treaties. The copyright year of each photograph is the year in which I first published it. No content on this site may be reproduced, copied, downloaded, distributed, modified, displayed, published, transmitted, sold or otherwise used, in whole or in part, without my prior written permission. Without limitation, no content on this site may be used to train, fine-tune, test or develop artificial intelligence or machine-learning systems, or be collected, scraped or included in any dataset, without my prior written permission. Access to this site does not grant any license or other right in its content, whether by implication, estoppel or otherwise.

Third-party content and data

Certain data, maps, software, fonts, names and trademarks used on this site belong to the third parties listed below. Each remains the property of its respective owner and is used under that owner’s license or terms, linked below. These materials are not covered by my copyright, and nothing on this site grants any right in them. The listing of, linking to or use of material from any of these parties, or the naming of any other organization on this site, does not imply that the party sponsors, endorses or is affiliated with this site or with me.

eBird: hotspot names, locations, links and bird data. eBird is a project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University. eBird API Terms of Use; Cornell Lab Terms of Use.
IUCN Red List of Threatened Species: conservation status data and links, owned by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). IUCN Red List Terms of Use.
BirdLife International: species data and factsheet links from the BirdLife Data Zone. BirdLife Data Zone Terms and Conditions; BirdLife International Terms and Conditions of Use.
OpenStreetMap: map data and map tiles, © OpenStreetMap contributors, made available under the Open Database License; tiles served by the OpenStreetMap Foundation. OpenStreetMap Copyright and License; Tile Usage Policy.
Leaflet: map software, © 2010–2026 Volodymyr Agafonkin. BSD 2-Clause License. Leaflet.markercluster: © 2012 David Leaver. MIT License.
Google Maps: location links to Google Maps, a service of Google LLC. Google Maps Additional Terms of Service.
Fonts: Jost, © 2020 The Jost Project Authors (license); Source Sans 3, © 2010–2020 Adobe, Reserved Font Name “Source” (license); Figtree, © 2022 The Figtree Project Authors (license); and Tenor Sans, © 2011 Denis Masharov, Reserved Font Names “Tenor” and “Tenor Sans” (license); all hosted on this site. All four fonts are licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.
WordPress: site software, © WordPress contributors. WordPress License (GNU General Public License). Plugins, including Contact Form 7 (Rock Lobster Inc.), are used under their respective licenses.
Cloudflare: content delivery, security and web analytics provided by Cloudflare, Inc. Cloudflare Terms of Use; Self-Serve Subscription Agreement.
Pixels: print sales at store.rainoff.com are provided by Pixels.com. Pixels Terms of Use.
Flickr: links to photographs hosted on Flickr, operated by Flickr, Inc., a SmugMug, Inc. company. Flickr Terms of Use.
Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn: social media links. Instagram and Facebook are trademarks of Meta Platforms, Inc.; LinkedIn is a trademark of LinkedIn Corporation. Instagram Terms of Use; Meta Terms of Service; LinkedIn User Agreement.

All other names, logos and trademarks on this site are the property of their respective owners.

Copyright infringement and takedown notices

To report content on this site that you believe infringes your copyright or other rights, or to report unauthorized use of content from this site, send a written notice to adam@rainoff.com. A notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 512) should include: identification of the copyrighted work; identification of the material claimed to be infringing and its location (URL); your name, postal address, telephone number and email address; a statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent or the law; a statement that the information in the notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are the copyright owner or are authorized to act on the owner’s behalf; and your physical or electronic signature.