Finnish parents are increasingly turning to AI tools to remove copyright markings from school photos, raising concerns among professional photographers about lost income, privacy and the future of a long-standing Finnish tradition.
As the new school year gets underway, children across Finland are once again taking part in annual school photo sessions. For many families, the photographs become keepsakes displayed at home or shared with relatives. But some parents are now finding another use for preview images: uploading them to AI services and using the technology to remove the copyright text placed over the photographs.
The practice has prompted discussion on social media, while the Finnish school photographers’ association says it has become aware of isolated cases in which preview photographs have been used without permission. For photographers, the issue is not simply about a watermark being removed. It can mean that a family obtains and uses a photograph without purchasing the image, leaving the photographer unpaid for the work.
Outi Simström, vice chair of the association, said many people misunderstand how school photography businesses make their money. The photographer is generally not paid by the school or daycare simply for arriving to photograph the children. Instead, the business depends on families choosing to purchase the photographs they want.
“A photographer is not paid by the school or daycare for coming in and photographing the children. The entrepreneur’s income comes from families voluntarily buying the pictures they want,” Simström said.
The legal protection surrounding photographs also extends beyond the visible copyright markings on an image. Emilia Hodge, a specialist in intellectual property law, said photographs have at least 50 years of protection under related rights. As a general rule, photographs cannot be copied or published without the photographer’s permission. Images that meet the requirements for copyright protection can receive considerably longer protection.
The arrival of widely available AI image tools has added a new concern because the technology can make it easier to turn a preview image into a usable copy. Mikko Säteri of Finnfoto, the umbrella organisation for Finland’s photography associations, said the unauthorised use of school photographs is not a new problem. Parents have been photographing preview images and using different software to remove watermarks for about a decade.
AI, however, has made the process more sophisticated. Säteri said modern tools can enlarge an image sufficiently to create a printable copy, potentially making it harder for photographers to distinguish between customers who have legitimately purchased an image and those who have obtained one without paying.
That development is forcing photography businesses to consider new ways of protecting their work and identifying photographs that have been used without permission. For an industry that already relies heavily on customers choosing to buy individual images, the wider availability of such tools creates an additional commercial challenge.
There is also a separate privacy issue when photographs of children are uploaded to external AI services. Simström urged parents to think carefully before sending such images to online platforms, particularly when the photograph contains a minor.
“When we’re talking about a picture of a person, and especially a minor, it’s material and personal data of a kind that I would always recommend thinking carefully about which external digital service you upload these images to. Afterwards, they can’t easily be removed,” she said.
The concern is not limited to the copyright status of the photograph. Uploading a child’s image to an external service means handing personal material to a third party, and parents may not always know how the service processes, stores or retains uploaded images.
School photography has a long history in Finland, stretching back around 160 years. The annual school portrait has become part of family life for generations, creating a visual record of children as they grow from early school years into adolescence.
Säteri has his own collection of such memories at home. He said school photographs can have value far beyond the commercial transaction between a photographer and a family.
“I think it’s wonderful to see photographs of my daughters from different periods lined up on the fridge,” he said.
That sentiment helps explain why school photography remains such a familiar part of Finnish life. But as AI makes it easier to manipulate and reproduce digital images, photographers are facing a new question: how can a tradition built around families voluntarily purchasing photographs continue when technology makes it increasingly easy to obtain a usable copy without doing so?
