Questions

A system of record for editorial work, with a marketplace built on it. Creators file their work into a Vault, check the details we draft for each file, and publish it with a price and clear licence terms. Buyers search by subject, shortlist what they need and license it on the published terms. Every file filed since the record opened carries its history: how it entered the platform, and every change to its standing since.

Journalists, photographers, illustrators and writers who sell their own work on their own terms, and the editors and desks who license it. It is built for professional editorial practice rather than the creator economy, so the tools assume volume, deadlines and a paper trail.

A creator files, publishes and prices work, sets its licence terms, and has a Vault and a Frontfolio. A buyer searches, shortlists, licenses and commissions work, for themselves or for a company. A reader browses and follows creators. You choose one at signup. To add a second role today you go through signup again, because there is no add-a-role control in your account yet. What you license as a buyer is kept apart from what you publish as a creator, and neither appears inside the other.

Through a bid. A buyer proposes a price and licence terms on a file, on a pack of files, or on a brief for work not yet made, and either side can counter until one accepts. Commissioned work then runs as an assignment, delivered against the brief. How deals work covers bids, counters, packs, delivery, revisions and what happens when a deal goes wrong.

Nothing until you sell. An account, uploading, publishing, being found in search and the community features are all free, and there is no paid plan or premium tier. Frontfiles charges only when a licence is sold: a 20% platform fee taken from your price, and a 20% buyer service fee the buyer pays on top. You keep 80% of the price you set. What you earn, below, works it through with real numbers.

Everything below. Frontfiles charges only when a licence is sold, and the two fees on this page are the only charges there are. There is no subscription, no trial that turns into a charge and no feature behind a paywall.

No. Press accreditation is something you can show on your profile if you hold it, never a condition of joining. You must be 16 or over to use Frontfiles, and 18 or over to publish work as a creator.

Photography, illustration and infographics as JPEG, PNG or WebP, and written work as plain text (.txt). TIFF is not accepted, so export to one of those three image formats first. Uploads work in batches, because the shoot, not the single frame, is the unit of work. Video and audio are coming soon.

Far less time than captioning every frame by hand. Drop in a batch, press Upload and describe the shoot once in the Brief box. We then read the capture details already in each file, draft a caption and a description, detect what is in the frame, and suggest which files belong together as a story. You review the drafts, keeping, editing or dismissing each one. Publishing is always the last step, and it is always yours.

No. From any open file you can apply its date, licence, price, credit or privacy to the rest of the batch in one action. A file under a CC licence keeps its own licence and price, and work you have already published is changed file by file. You can also accept every pending suggestion on the files you have opened in one action. Files you have not opened stay as drafts, so nothing is published unread.

It drafts, and you decide. For each upload it proposes a caption and a description, plus the accessibility text almost nobody writes by hand: a screen-reader description and a long description. It also detects what is in the image, reads the place from the capture data, suggests which files form a story, checks the image against our safety policy, and indexes your published work so search can find it by meaning. Every suggestion arrives as a draft, and nothing publishes until you approve it. Our servers enforce that rule, so it cannot be skipped from the screen. One exception, and it is most of what is on the site today: the archive we imported on 4 August 2026 was published in bulk as part of the import, without that review step. As of 2 September 2026 that covers 9,393 of the 9,499 published files. Every file published since has been reviewed. You can switch AI drafting off for your account, and your files are then never sent for AI analysis. The detail is in the AI Processing Disclosure.

A few hard checks and one advisory one. Publishing needs a caption, a licence, and a price when the licence is paid, and an exact copy of a file you have already uploaded is refused. Separately, near-duplicate detection flags files in your Vault that look like resized, re-encoded or lightly cropped versions of the one in front of you, so you do not list the same frame twice at two prices. It only advises: it never blocks you, and nothing it finds is published. A check for your image elsewhere on the web is built but switched off.

Yes. Your Frontfolio is a public page under your own handle. It groups your work into stories and collections you curate, lists your coverage areas and specialisations, counts the assignments you have completed and has an Available for Work switch for commissions. Unlike an ordinary portfolio, each item can show how it entered the platform, and anything you have published and priced can be licensed straight from the page once its validation state allows it.

It is built to be. Every copy Frontfiles publishes carries a rights block written into the file itself: your name, credit line, copyright notice, a stable identifier and a link back to the file’s page. Most image pipelines strip that data, which is how pictures lose their authors. A licensed JPEG, PNG or WebP download also records the licensee and the licence. The block uses the standard search engines read, so once public indexing is switched on your work can appear with a licensing link attached.

Yes. You own everything you upload, and Frontfiles claims no ownership of it. You grant one narrow licence, limited to running the service: storing your files, making the previews the platform displays, running AI drafting (on by default, and you can switch it off for your account), showing published work on public pages, and showing it in factual presentations of the platform, such as our discovery and landing pages. Apart from the licences buyers take at checkout, which Frontfiles grants under a separate clause of the Terms, it never extends to selling or sublicensing your work. It ends when you delete the file or your account, except for records the Privacy Policy requires us to keep and a record, with no content, that a published work existed and was withdrawn. The full wording is in the Terms.

No. Frontfiles never asks for exclusivity. You can sell the same file anywhere else without penalty, and nothing about how your work is ranked or priced depends on how much of it you give us: discovery order is shuffled, and the price suggestion looks only at format and licence type, never at your volume or tenure. Exclusivity can only ever be a term inside a single deal, and exclusive terms on bids are paused until the platform can enforce the period a buyer and creator agree.

Not unless you set the file to allow it. Frontfiles does not train models on your work, and you cannot be signed up to an AI training licence by accident: the licences offered today, editorial and Creative Commons, grant no training rights. Every published file also carries a machine-readable text and data mining declaration inside the file, telling outside crawlers what they may do with it. You set it per file. If you set nothing, Frontfiles writes its editorial default: mining prohibited except by search engines, so your work stays findable while those rights stay reserved. You can see and change the value in the file’s settings. The AI that drafts your metadata runs on Google Cloud, on Vertex AI Gemini and Cloud Vision, under Google’s commitment not to use customer data to train its models.

Yes, under three Creative Commons licences: CC BY 4.0, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 and CC0 1.0. A file is either free under Creative Commons or for sale, never both: to switch, you clear one before choosing the other. The credit line is fixed at the moment someone claims the file, so changing your display name later does not change how existing copies must credit you. Choosing CC0, the public-domain dedication, asks you to confirm first, because it cannot be withdrawn from anyone who has already claimed the file. Creative Commons is available for JPEG, PNG and WebP, where we can write the licence into the file and strip camera and location data on the way out.

Only you, with one exception that covers most of what is on the site today. Two settings matter. Visibility: new uploads default to public, so you opt out of being visible rather than in. You can set a file or a whole batch to private or restricted, and previews of anything private, restricted or unpublished are shown only to you, even if someone else has the link. Review: no file reaches a public page until you have approved its details, and our servers enforce that rule, not only the screen. The exception: the archive we imported on 4 August 2026 was published in bulk as part of the import, without that review step. As of 2 September 2026 that covers 9,393 of the 9,499 published files. Every file published since has been reviewed. The only thing that reads your files before you publish is AI drafting, which sends them to our cloud vision providers. It is on by default, and you can switch it off for your account.

No. Public pages show watermarked previews made from your file, never the original: 1024 pixels on the long edge in grids, 1600 on the file page. A smaller thumbnail without a watermark, 400 pixels on the short edge, is made for the views where you manage your own work. No public page shows it, though anyone who has its direct address can still load it. The original stays in access-controlled storage and is released only to a buyer with a recorded licence for it, to someone claiming it under a Creative Commons licence you offered, and to you.

Your exact location stays off public pages unless you choose to show it. Frontfiles reads the coordinates from the file so you can see and use them, strips them from the thumbnail, preview and share card it publishes, checks afterwards that none survived, and holds the file back if one did. Public location is shown at city level: the place you named or, if you named none, the city the coordinates fall in. You can show a file’s exact capture point on that file’s own page, rounded to about 11 metres, and switching it off removes it from Frontfiles. Camera serial numbers and editing history are removed from public copies and from licensed downloads. One thing to know before you offer a sensitive file: the full-resolution file a buyer licenses still contains its original coordinates. Treat a licensed download as carrying the capture point.

Yes to both. You can export your data and close your account. Closing it deletes your account and personal data, withdraws your published work from public pages and removes identifying metadata. Two things remain: what the law requires us to keep, and a record with no content that a published work existed and was withdrawn, so deletion cannot be used to rewrite the record. Keep your own copies of your originals in any case.

Frontfiles is run from Portugal by Frontfiles, Lda, under EU law. Uploads are processed in your region: within the European Union for creators in the EU, within the United States for creators in the US, and in the EU when your region cannot be determined. The Privacy Policy sets out what we keep and for how long.

That every file carries its history, and that someone with no reason to trust us can check it. At intake the platform records the capture details held in the file. After that, every change to the file’s standing is added to its record as a new entry, one per event. The database refuses any change to an entry once it is written, whichever account asks, including the one our own servers use. That is what tamper-evident means here: there is no sanctioned way for anyone, us included, to edit or erase the history. Buyers see the timeline, and it travels with the licence.

That it is true. Frontfiles records where a file came from and what has happened to it since. It does not judge what an image shows, whether the reporting is accurate, or whether the work is legally fit for your use. Provenance is evidence for your judgement, not a substitute for it. We hold our own copy to the same line, and our build fails on wording that overstates it.

The top of the provenance ladder. A file starts at provenance pending: filed by its creator, with automated signals recorded but not yet corroborated. It moves to corroborated when an independent outside signal agrees with the creator’s claim, and to under review while a Frontfiles reviewer assesses it. Blue Protocol is reached only when a Frontfiles reviewer affirms the file’s provenance. No automated path leads there, and it is the only state shown in Frontfiles blue. Every move is recorded in the file’s history with the reviewer who made it, and no state is ever quietly removed.

An identity mark, not a quality mark. It appears once Veriff, our identity provider, has checked who you are. It says your identity has been established, and nothing about any individual file: that is what the provenance ladder is for. Finishing onboarding does not grant it, and no badge shows until the check is complete.

You can check most of it yourself. The product is built to say what it cannot do: a field you never filled in reads as not declared instead of silently taking our default, a control that cannot work is labelled or removed instead of failing after you fill in a form, and every section of this page that describes something not yet switched on says so. Our build also rejects a list of overclaiming words. That check matches words, not meaning, so the rest depends on review, and on you being able to look.

You keep 80% of the price you set. Frontfiles takes a 20% platform fee from your price and adds a 20% buyer service fee on the buyer’s side. On a photograph priced at EUR 220, the buyer pays EUR 264, you receive EUR 176 before any withholding tax that applies to you, and Frontfiles receives EUR 88. Each side sees its own figures before committing: the buyer sees the price, the buyer service fee and the total; you see the price, the platform fee and your net payout.

Not on a deal already open. Both fees are fixed when a bid is created and apply for the life of that bid and any assignment that comes from it. Countering changes the price, never the fees. If Frontfiles changes its fees, open bids keep the terms they started with. New bids get the new fees, and so does any direct purchase made after the change.

No. Your share on your first licence is your share on your thousandth. There are no contributor levels, no ranking that changes your share, no volume threshold and no yearly reset. The same two fees apply to everyone.

Frontfiles keeps 33.3% of what a buyer pays, which is 40% of the price the creator set. The platforms below keep between half and 85% of a licence, and none of them publishes a full rate card.

You do. We only suggest a price. The suggestion starts from published rate guides for each format and shows its reasoning, so you are not pricing blind. Today the editorial licence is the only paid licence, and the only one it prices. If you publish a paid file with no price, the editorial suggestion is filled in as a starting price, so nothing paid goes out unpriced; you can change it at any time from the file page, and it never overwrites a price you set. Creative Commons files carry no price. The buyer pays your price plus the buyer service fee, you receive your price less the platform fee, and both figures are shown before anything is agreed.

A catalogue sale is held for seven days after purchase, then paid on the next daily payout run. The hold exists because card payments can be reversed. It shortens the window for clawing back a payout, though a chargeback can still arrive months later. Commissioned work is paid on the next hourly run once the buyer confirms delivery, with no hold. If the buyer never confirms, delivery is accepted automatically 14 days after you deliver, and the payout is held another 14 days in case of a dispute: about a month in total. Payouts go through Stripe Connect to your own account, and your earnings page shows each sale’s gross, your share and whether the payout has left.

It is the stricter of the two. Every money event is written to a ledger where each entry is chained to the one before it on the same deal, so editing an earlier entry would visibly break the chain. The database refuses edits and deletions on that ledger outright, including from our own systems, so a correction is always a new entry, never a change to an old one. One rounding rule produces both the buyer’s total and the creator’s payout, so the two figures come from the same arithmetic.

Nothing is deducted today, and no payout that would require withholding is sent either. We calculate and record Portuguese withholding tax, but the deduction is switched off while a Portuguese tax adviser rules on whether a creator payout is a royalty and whether Frontfiles must withhold. Until then, any payout that would attract withholding is held rather than paid in full, because paying gross would leave tax owed with no way to recover it. The hold applies to catalogue sales, described above, and to commissions, described in How deals work. The rates we have built for, which the adviser’s opinion may change: 16.5% for a Portuguese resident individual, which is a prepayment against your own income tax, and 25% for a non-resident. A tax treaty can lower the non-resident rate, to 15% for Brazil, 10% for the United States and 5% for the United Kingdom, France and Spain. None of Portugal’s royalty treaties takes it to zero, and no treaty rate applies until we hold your 21-RFI form and a valid residence certificate, neither of which we collect yet.

If we can pay you there. Today that means the EEA, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Switzerland. The limit comes from the payment networks open to a Portuguese company, not from any judgement about your work, and Stripe has the final say on each account. Outside those countries you can still open an account, file work, build a Frontfolio and be found. Selling opens when payouts reach your country. We list this here so you know before you spend an evening uploading.

Because the creator sets and publishes the price and terms before you arrive, and the file’s history comes with it. Frontfiles grants the licence at checkout, on exactly those terms. Where a price is published, that is the price: no quote on request, no hidden rate card, no login to see it. You pay the creator’s price plus a 20% buyer service fee. Where no price is published for the use you need, you place a bid and the creator answers. Nothing subscribes you, renews automatically or turns a trial into a charge. You pay per licence.

Describe what you need in a sentence, as you would to a picture editor. Explore reads the request, picks out place, year, format and subject, and ranks the archive by meaning, so the picture you describe comes back even if nobody tagged it that way. Of what it picks out, format becomes a visible filter, while place, year and subject shape the search itself. Dates have their own panel, which you set yourself. Above the results, a row lists every constraint the search is using, each removable in one click, and a one-line summary says how many results there are, in what formats and from where. Where your browser supports it, you can dictate the query.

A research briefing that runs beside your search. It takes what you already have in Explore, your query plus any format and place it picked up, and searches the open web across four tiers of sources, weighted so local and specialist reporting ranks above the global wires. It returns quotable passages with their outlet and link, how many outlets have covered the subject and where, and a tier of investigative, local and humanitarian sources. It ends by naming the sources that overlap with recent files in the archive. It replaces the twelve open tabs at the start of a commission, and cites everything.

Yes. A Lightbox holds up to 200 files while you browse, in an order you set by dragging. Share it as a link and an editor can open the same set without an account; anything since unpublished or made private drops out of their view. From the shortlist you can bid on a pack of up to 20 files, one bid per creator, because each bid has a single counterparty, and the Lightbox tells you how many files and creators did not fit. Collections are different: a creator’s own public, ordered set of their work, not a copy of your shortlist.

An explicit licence and the file it covers. The licence states its type and term: the standard editorial licence runs for one year from purchase, non-exclusive, worldwide, in the one publication you name at checkout. Licence types are a fixed set, not free text, and the terms for the two offered today, editorial and Creative Commons, are published at a fixed address you can read before you buy. A licence grants rights and never transfers copyright, which stays with the creator in every case. You receive the original only once licensed, and image files arrive with their credit, copyright and licence details embedded.

No. An editorial licence carries no right to train a model on the file. Frontfiles does not train models on creators’ work, and every file we deliver carries a machine-readable data mining term set by its creator, which by default reserves the work against text and data mining. Training rights cannot be bought on Frontfiles today. If you need them, that is a conversation with the person who owns the work.

Yes, through Frontfiles Newsroom, a separate press distribution service at its own address. Nothing has been published there yet, so this describes how it works rather than what it holds. Organisations that prove they control their domain, by a DNS record or an email at that domain, publish packs of files under five named licence types, free to use within those terms. Embargoes are built in: a scheduled lift time, preview links for named journalists, and downloads locked until the lift. Before a pack goes out, an admin at the organisation must confirm a rights warranty covering subject releases, third-party content and music. Every download creates a signed receipt naming the file, the terms, the credit line and the time, at a public address with a machine-readable version beside it, which anyone can check against our published keys without asking us. Newsroom has its own library. Work listed for licensing on Frontfiles never appears there.