Terms of Service

These terms cover your use of Xposure: the website, the dashboard, your portfolio, client galleries, and the Studio Manager. Creating an account means you accept them. If you do not, do not use the platform.

Two other documents form part of this agreement. The privacy policy explains what we do with personal data. The legal notice says who you are contracting with. If you join the ambassador programme, its own terms cover that as well.

1. Your account

You need to be 18 or older to hold an account, and the details you give us need to be accurate. Keep your password to yourself. Anything done through your account is treated as done by you, so tell us quickly if you think somebody else has got in.

Dormant free accounts. Storing photographs costs us money every month, including for accounts nobody has opened in years. If you are on the Free plan and do not sign in for 12 consecutive months, we may delete the account and everything in it. We will email you at least twice before that happens, the last time no less than 30 days beforehand, and signing in resets the clock. Paid accounts are never deleted for inactivity.

Team members. On the Studio plan you can give other people their own login to your account as team members, each with a role you choose, and remove them whenever you like. What a team member does in your studio is treated as done by you, and you answer for it under these terms. A team member keeps their own Xposure account under these terms as well: joining your studio gives them no rights over your account, and gives you none over theirs.

2. What you can put on Xposure

Xposure is built for professional photography. Most of what follows is about one line: hosting a photograph and selling it are different things, and the rules for selling are written by the card networks rather than by us.

Private client galleries. Boudoir, artistic nudes, and other tasteful work involving nudity are allowed in galleries that are PIN protected or otherwise not publicly reachable. This is ordinary professional photography and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Anything you sell through the platform. Photo sales and paid bookings run through Stripe, and Stripe does not permit adult content to be sold across its network. So nothing sexually explicit or pornographic can be put up for sale on Xposure, whatever it is. Sell that elsewhere. If it happens through your account it puts payments at risk for every photographer on the platform, which is why this one is absolute.

Public pages. Your portfolio, any gallery you publish without a PIN, and anything else a search engine can reach need to stay free of nudity. These pages sit on our domain and get indexed.

Posts. Posts you publish on your website are public content, and you are responsible for them: the words, the photographs and the links. Everything above about public pages applies to them.

Never, anywhere on the platform. Sexual content involving minors. Intimate images published without the consent of the person in them. Content that is illegal where you or your clients are. Material that infringes somebody else's copyright or trade mark. Malware, phishing pages, or anything designed to defraud. We report the first two categories to the authorities and terminate the account immediately, with no notice and no refund.

Outside that last group, if we think something breaks these rules we will tell you what we found and give you a reasonable chance to take it down or to explain, before we do anything to your account. See section 11.

How we find it. An automated scanner looks at the thumbnails of uploaded photographs and scores them for nudity. It only ever puts something in a queue for one of us to look at, and it cannot hide, delete, or restrict anything by itself. Since nudity is allowed in private galleries, most of what it flags is not a problem and gets closed without you ever hearing about it. What we are looking for is the last group above, and nudity that has ended up on a public page or on sale. If we do act, you get told what and why, and you can contest it.

3. Your copyright, and the licence we need

Your work is yours. You keep the copyright and every other right in the photographs you upload. Nothing here transfers ownership of anything.

For the software to do its job you give us a limited licence: to store your files, to resize and compress them, to generate thumbnails and previews, to read their technical EXIF data, and to display them to the people you have shared them with. That licence exists to operate the platform, it lasts as long as the files are on it, and it covers nothing else. We do not sell your photographs, license them to anybody, train anything on them, or put them in our own marketing unless you have said yes in writing.

You are telling us, by uploading, that you have the right to. That includes model releases where the law where you work requires them.

4. Unlimited uploads, and what that means

The Starter, Pro, and Studio plans include unlimited image uploads. That is meant to cover the working life of a busy professional photographer, and for essentially everyone it simply does.

What it is not is a backup drive or a bulk storage host. If an account is being used that way, or is uploading by script, or is consuming resources on a completely different scale from other photographers on the same plan, we may slow uploads, cap storage, or in the extreme suspend the account. We will contact you and give you a chance to sort it out before we do any of that.

5. Your subscription

This section is about what you pay us. What your clients pay you is section 6.

Paid plans are billed in advance, monthly or annually, and renew automatically until you cancel. Cancel whenever you like: the plan stays active until the end of the period you have already paid for, and then stops.

Team seats. Every team member, and every invite still open, takes a seat. Seats are billed with your plan, per seat, for the same period. Seats you add are charged pro rata for the rest of the period; seats you remove stop at the next renewal. You cannot go below the seats your team is using, so remove people first. If you leave the Studio plan, your team is paused and keeps its place until you come back.

The 14 day guarantee. If you are unhappy in the first 14 days of a new paid plan, or of an upgrade to a more expensive one, ask us and we will refund it in full. This applies once per plan change, on the first billing period only.

After those 14 days, payments for a billing period already begun are not refunded. If you are a consumer rather than a business, any statutory right of withdrawal you have under the law where you live sits on top of this and is not affected by it.

Failed payments. If a payment fails we will retry it and email you. If it is still unpaid after 14 days we may downgrade the account to Free, which can put you over the Free plan's limits. We will not delete your photographs for non payment.

Price changes. We can change our prices. If a change affects a plan you are on, we will email you at least 15 days before it applies to you, and it will only ever take effect at your next renewal. If you do not want to pay the new price, cancel before then.

6. Selling to your clients

You can sell session bookings, with deposits and balances, through the Studio Manager, individual photographs out of your galleries, and prints, wall art and albums made by our print lab. All of it runs through Stripe Connect on your own connected Stripe account.

You are the seller. On every client transaction, you are the merchant of record. Your client is paying your Stripe account, not ours. You set the prices, the deposit, the session terms, and your own cancellation and refund policy.

Our fee. We take a platform fee on client transactions. The rate is shown to you before you switch payments on, and it comes out of each transaction automatically; Stripe pays you the rest. On download sales, the platform fee also includes Stripe's payment processing fee, charged at the rate shown in your payment settings before you switch payments on; it comes out of each sale automatically together with our commission. What the platform fee covers on print sales is set out under “Prints and albums” below. If we change the rate we will give you 15 days notice by email.

Refunds and disputes. They are yours to handle, in Stripe, with your client. We are not a party to the sale and we do not mediate. If a chargeback goes against you, the money comes out of your balance, not ours. Prints and albums have their own rules for rejecting an order and for faulty items, below.

Tax. Working out what tax you owe on your sales, collecting it, and paying it is on you, as is the accuracy of the business details you put on your invoices and contracts.

You will need to connect and verify a Stripe account. Stripe's own terms and the Stripe Connected Account Agreement apply to you directly, alongside these.

Prints and albums

What this covers. You can offer prints, wall art, cards and albums in your client galleries. Your client orders and pays in the gallery, and a print lab makes the order and ships it to them. Our lab is Prodigi. Print sales are available on the Starter, Pro and Studio plans. They are not available during a free trial, unless we have agreed otherwise with you.

You are the seller. As with every other sale on Xposure, you are the merchant of record. Your client pays your connected Stripe account. You set the prices in your price sheets, and the sale is between you and your client.

How the lab is paid. We hold the account with the lab and we pay it for every order. We recover what an order costs us through the platform fee on that sale: the lab's price for the items, the shipping, any branding inserts you add, and Stripe's payment processing fee. The lab's price is quoted again at checkout, with a small margin for exchange rates and the lab's own VAT. If your price no longer covers those costs and our print fee, the sale is refused and we tell you.

Our print fee. On top of those costs, our fee on prints is 10% of your markup on the Starter plan and 0% on Pro and Studio. Your markup is what your client pays for the items after any discount, minus the lab's price and any shipping you have chosen to pay for your client. An order keeps the fee that applied when it was paid.

Tax. VAT on your print sales is your responsibility, as it is for downloads and sessions. Prints are physical goods. Where VAT is due depends on where the lab ships from and where your client lives, so it can differ from your downloads. Some products are made outside the EU, in the United Kingdom or the United States. Your client may then owe import VAT or duties on delivery, which neither we nor the lab collect. Your prices include VAT, so switching VAT on changes what you keep, never what your client pays.

Checking an order before it prints. Every client order waits for you to review it. Checking the crops, the files and the colours is your responsibility. The lab prints exactly the file it receives and does no colour correction. You can approve an order, put an item on hold and upload a corrected file, or reject the order. An order you have not reviewed goes to the lab automatically when the review time shown on the order in your dashboard runs out. An order with an item on hold never goes automatically. What is printed is your responsibility, including an order that went to the lab automatically.

Rejecting an order. Until an order goes to the lab you can reject it in the dashboard. Your client gets back what they paid for the prints and the shipping, and the lab cost, the shipping and the print fee come back out of our fee. Stripe's processing fee is not returned, as on any refund. Downloads bought in the same order stay with your client. Once an order has reached the lab, the dashboard offers a refund only if the lab can still cancel it, which is rarely the case. After that there is no refund from Xposure. You can still refund your client from your own Stripe dashboard. That refund comes out of your balance, and the lab cost and our fee are not returned.

Problems with a delivered order. Your client reports a problem from their order page, with photos. The order page shows how many days after delivery they have to report it, and the last day, counted from dispatch, on which a report is accepted. You look at it first. If the lab is at fault, for a damaged item, a misprint, a wrong or missing item or a lost parcel, you forward it to us and we file it with the lab. A lab fault is put right with a remake, at no cost to you or your client, not with a refund. A mistake in the order itself, such as a crop, a file, a colour or the choice of photograph, is yours to pay for. You can reorder the item at lab cost from your dashboard. Your client deals with you, not with us or the lab.

Your own orders. You can order prints for yourself, for samples or to sell in person. You pay the lab's price, the shipping and Stripe's processing fee, and no print fee. You pay by card each time.

Branding inserts. On Pro and Studio you can add a packing slip or a card to your orders. The lab's price for it is added to the cost of each order that carries it.

Albums. You design an album yourself and upload it. Your client approves the proof in the gallery before they pay. The rules above apply once it is paid, except that an album goes to the lab without a further review, because you approved the design by sending it.

Pausing print sales. We can pause print sales for everyone, for example when the lab has an outage. Orders already paid carry on.

Closing your account. You cannot delete your account while a print order is between payment and shipping.

7. Contracts and signatures

The Studio Manager lets you build contract templates and have clients sign them when they book.

The wording is yours and so is the responsibility for it. We provide the tooling, not legal advice, and we are not a party to anything you sign with a client.

When a client signs, we store the exact text they agreed to, their typed signature, and an audit record: timestamp, IP address, and basic device information. The signed copy is frozen at that moment, so editing a template later never changes a contract somebody has already signed.

8. Google Calendar

You can connect a Google Calendar so your availability reflects what is already in your diary and confirmed bookings land in it. It is optional, you pick which calendars are involved, and disconnecting revokes our access. Google's terms cover your use of Google's side of it.

9. Your clients' personal data

This section is our data processing agreement with you. It applies whenever we handle personal data on your behalf, and it is written to meet Article 28 of the GDPR, so you can point a client at it if they ask you for one.

Who is who. For personal data about your clients, the photographs you upload of them, their names, email addresses, phone numbers, shipping addresses, the enquiries they send through your contact form, bookings, orders including print orders, questionnaire answers, your notes about them, and signed contracts, you are the controller and we are your processor. For your own account and billing data, we are the controller and the privacy policy governs it.

What we do with it. Subject matter and purpose: running the platform for you. Duration: as long as your account is open, plus the retention described in the privacy policy. Categories of people: your clients, and anyone who opens a gallery you have shared, and people who write to you through your contact form. Types of data: photographs and their metadata, names, email addresses, phone numbers, enquiry messages and your notes on them and on your clients, booking and order records, shipping addresses for print orders and the photographs of a problem a client reports, questionnaire answers, signed contracts and their audit records, and technical data such as IP addresses.

Concretely, we undertake that:

• We process your clients' personal data only to provide the platform to you and on your instructions. Your instructions are these terms plus whatever you do in the product. If we ever think an instruction breaks data protection law, we will tell you instead of quietly following it.
• Adding team members to your studio is one of those instructions. They see and handle your clients' data on your behalf, within the role you give them. Deciding who may, and making sure they keep it confidential, is up to you.
• We do not sell it, rent it, share it with anybody outside the sub-processors listed in the privacy policy, or use it to train machine learning models.
• Everyone at Xposure with access is bound to keep it confidential, and access is limited to the people who need it to run the service or to answer your support requests.
• We keep appropriate security measures under Article 32. Concretely: everything travels over TLS, passwords are stored only as bcrypt hashes, two factor authentication is available on every account, calendar and booking tokens are encrypted with a separate key, backups are encrypted before they leave the server, stored photographs are encrypted at rest, administrative access is restricted and logged, and an admin impersonating an account for support is recorded and cannot trigger a data export.
• Something we would rather you heard here than worked out later: gallery PINs are stored in a form we can read back, because you need to be able to look one up and give it to a client. A PIN keeps a gallery away from the public and from search engines. It is not a secret held cryptographically, so please do not use it as one, and do not reuse a password as a PIN.
• We use the sub-processors named in the privacy policy, and you authorise them by agreeing to these terms. If we replace one, or add one that touches data we already hold for you, we will tell you at least 15 days beforehand. If it does not work for you, tell us within those 15 days, and if we cannot find a way around it you can cancel your plan rather than accept it.
• A new feature you switch on yourself is different. If we build something optional that needs a new sub-processor, and it only ever touches data belonging to photographers who turn that feature on, then turning it on is your authorisation and there is no waiting period. The sub-processor is named before you enable it, the same way Google Calendar works today, and if you never enable it, nothing about your account changes.
• We help you answer your clients when they exercise their rights. Most of it you can do yourself in the dashboard; where you cannot, ask us. If a client contacts us directly about data you control, we will point them back to you and leave the decision with you.
• If we suffer a personal data breach affecting your clients' data, we will tell you without undue delay and in any case within 48 hours of becoming aware of it, with what we know at the time, so that you can meet your own 72 hour deadline. We will help with your data protection impact assessments and any prior consultation, so far as it relates to us.
• When your account closes, we delete your clients' data on the timetable in the privacy policy. You can export it first, at any time, from your account. Where the law requires us to keep something, such as invoice records, we keep only that and only for as long as required.
• We will give you the information you need to show that we are doing all of the above. If you need a formal audit, we will agree reasonable scope and timing with you first, and it is at your cost unless it turns up something material.

Transfers. Your data lives in the EU. Where a sub-processor is outside it, the transfer runs on Standard Contractual Clauses or an adequacy decision. The privacy policy lists each one and says which.

What we still do for ourselves. We measure traffic on our own marketing pages, and we use the platform's own records to run it: billing, fraud prevention, support, security, and aggregate statistics that never identify your clients. We do not record sessions inside client galleries or the dashboard.

10. Reporting content

If something on Xposure is illegal, infringes your copyright, or is an intimate image of you published without your consent, use the report form or email abuse@xposureapp.net. Tell us the URL, what the problem is, and how to reach you. That address is also our point of contact for authorities under the Digital Services Act, and we accept notices in English or Dutch.

We look at every report. Anything involving a minor, or an intimate image published without consent, gets acted on immediately. For everything else we will tell both the reporter and the account holder what we decided and why, and the account holder can reply to that email to contest it.

11. Suspension and termination

You can close your account whenever you want, from your settings.

We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, does not pay, or is being used in a way that endangers the platform or other people on it. Except where section 2 says otherwise, we will email you first, say what the problem is, and give you a reasonable chance to fix it. If we suspend you, we tell you why and you can contest it by replying.

If you close the account yourself, export first. The export lives in Settings under Privacy and is available for as long as the account is open. The moment you confirm deletion we lock the account, which means you cannot sign in and cannot export any more. That lock lasts 30 days and then everything is erased. Those 30 days are there so a deletion made by mistake, or by somebody who should not have been in your account, can be undone: the email we send you at that moment carries the link that reverses it. They are a recovery window, not an export window, and you should know that now rather than at the worst possible moment.

If we close it, you get 30 days from our email to ask us for your files, and we will produce the export for you even though the account is locked. If we terminated you for content in the last group in section 2, neither of these applies.

12. Uptime, backups, and what we are liable for

We work hard at keeping the platform up and quick, and we do not promise it always will be. There is no uptime guarantee here. The service is provided as it is and as it happens to be available.

Keep your own backups. We deliver galleries, we are not an archive. Your RAW files and your full resolution exports need to exist somewhere that is not Xposure. Please take this one seriously.

The cap. If something goes wrong and you have a claim against us, the most we can owe you in total is what you paid us in the 12 months before it happened. We are not liable for lost profit, lost business, lost bookings, or lost data beyond that.

What we never exclude. Nothing above limits our liability for fraud, for our own deliberate or grossly negligent acts, for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or for anything else Belgian law does not permit us to exclude. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are untouched by any of this.

13. If someone comes after us because of you

You are putting other people's photographs on our servers, so this needs saying. If somebody makes a claim against us because of what you uploaded, sold, or promised through Xposure, you cover us for it: the claim itself, and the reasonable legal costs of dealing with it. That covers copyright claims, claims by people in your photographs, claims by your clients about your work, and your breaches of these terms. It does not cover anything caused by us. We will tell you promptly about any such claim, let you take charge of defending it, and not settle it behind your back.

14. Changes to the platform

Xposure changes constantly, which is mostly why you would use it. Features get added, reworked, and occasionally retired. If we remove something you rely on, or make a change that materially reduces what your plan does, we will give you 15 days notice and you can cancel and get a pro rata refund. Beta features are labelled as such and can change or disappear without that notice.

15. You and your clients

We make the software, you run the business. Whatever happens between you and a client, about money, delivery, quality, timing, or a contract, is between the two of you. That includes payments taken through the platform. We do not mediate and we are not responsible for the photography you deliver.

16. Law and courts

Belgian law governs these terms. Disputes go to the courts of Belgium. If you are a consumer, this does not take away your right to rely on the mandatory law of the country you live in, or to bring a case in your local courts where that law lets you.

17. Changes to these terms

We can update these terms. For anything material, you get at least 15 days notice by email or in the dashboard before it takes effect, and the version number and date at the top of this page change. Carrying on using Xposure after that means you accept the new version. If you do not, cancel before it takes effect and we will refund the unused part of what you have paid.

18. The rest

If a court strikes out part of these terms, the rest still stands. Not enforcing something straight away does not mean we have given it up. You cannot transfer your account to somebody else without asking us; we can transfer this agreement if the business is sold, and we will tell you if that happens. Neither of us is liable for failures caused by things genuinely outside our control. These terms, the privacy policy, and the legal notice are the whole agreement between us about Xposure.

Questions about any of this go to hello@xposureapp.net.