World Athletics Solidifies Its Image Rights and Metadata Workflow

28 October 2026

World Athletics has centralized rights control along with a more structured image-distribution workflow by partnering with Getty Images.

On 28 October 2023, World Athletics announced that it has entered into a multiyear agreement with Getty Images to launch The World Athletics Collection, a dedicated archive of imagery from World Athletics events. Now, media, brands, broadcasters, and other organisations seeking to license World Athletics event images for editorial and commercial use must access the collection via Getty Images or contact Getty Images directly.

Under the World Athletics and Getty agreement, Getty acts as the exclusive photography provider, licensed to capture, distribute, and manage imagery from World Athletics events worldwide. The governing body retains rights to the overall collection of images, with works captured by both World Athletics and Getty photographers included.

How the New Rights Model Works

Free image library: Media outlets are still offered free editorial access to a curated World Athletics image library, maintained on the World Athletics website.

Getty-tied licensing: But the new agreement signals a strategic shift in how World Athletics plans to more effectively license their archive and event imagery. Getty becomes the central hub, and the avenue to access World Athletics content is nudging toward a fee-based rather than free model.

Athletics marketing and digital rights owned: Separately, World Athletics’ agreements state the governing organisation as owning all marketing rights and all media rights. Specifically, that includes the right to exploit digital content and archive or data material in any media.

As sports organisations collect and publish more photos, a solid metadata infrastructure matters. Findings published by Fotoware, an image management system, illustrate some current best practices.

A Fotoware article published on 12 June 2023, Workflow in Sports Photography, describes a two-stage classification workflow. AI-based optical character recognition (OCR) is used to recognize and tag each photo’s athlete number. Metadata can then be extracted, standardized, and embedded to enable classification, secondary sorting, and rights information flow to downstream publishing front-ends.

The Fotoware article also highlighted a similar setup in use for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics captured through the AIPS, the international sports photographic agency.

With major, globally public and attended events like World Athletics’, permissions and regulatory workflows are another consideration. Consent management can be important, especially when private individuals and minors may be identifiable in photos, as the images might be classified as personal data subject to privacy regulations. This question is particularly salient in Europe, with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requiring the highest consent standards.

More on this is available via Picdar altered photos rules.

World Athletics media and accreditation materials show a tightly structured approach. The media accreditation process is handled through the World Athletics Event Management System (WA EMS), a streamlined online platform with clearly defined photo accreditation roles and protocols.

The World Athletics Series Event Guide breaks out eight discrete photo-operation tasks, including coordinating services for photographers, controlling access areas, briefing photographers on-site, and coordinating the photo managers team. These point to a programmatic, widely adopted approach to photo rights and licensing at World Athletics events.

While the gatekeeping element to image rights at big athletic events has been managed through formal accreditation systems, the World Athletics changes represent the quickening progress in how sources and rights information is captured, tagged, and made accessible:

Editing and rights details need to be efficiently embedded into images at the point of capture, to aid efficient licensing. As pointers, the 2023 World Athletics Photo Award rules state that entries may be validated with requests for the original image, adjacent frames and other evidence. The 2023 Photo Award terms also include a breadth of rights granted, including a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, and irrevocable license to use the photographs.

Image metadata is increasingly important for digital publishing platforms, where licensing is specified for repurposing and re-syndication. From the 1996 Olympics onward, the casual-wear brand Nike took an active interest in evolving photo copyright practices for the Olympic Games, as Nike contracted photographers for its own-linked events. That resulted in a systematic archive and authoritative way for publishers to license a layer of images from the Games that coincided with Nike activities. That Nike Affiliate-Free Archive—a database of images—took a ground-breaking approach to sports photo-licensing. Typically, media organizations license a set of still images through accreditation of the event, but Nike assembled an exclusive archive whose images were only published in connection with Nike.

World Athletics is now formulating its pictures policy to be more akin to Nike’s milestone photo licensing agreement, enabling more controlled monetization of its image rights.

Another opportunity is connecting this with World Athletics’ overall content strategy and programs. For instance, the 2023 Photo Award points to the fuel of athlete and future artist participation as a content source, while the Content Creator Programme shows the body digests, builds, and puts this imagery to use in official content development.

In conclusion, World Athletics’ shift to managing rights-centric image access through Getty, supported by the infrastructures and rights structures it’s clarifying, represents a shift in industrial operations. Moving to more structured, quantified, and formalized image access enables—even if it does so behind acknowledged costs—greater efficiencies in athletic-media production.