Royalty-free means a buyer pays once and can use an image again and again within the licence's terms, while rights-managed means each use is priced and licensed separately by its medium, size, period and territory.
General information, not legal advice. Laws differ by country and state — check with a lawyer where you work before you rely on it.
The two models price the same photo in very different ways. Royalty-free suits buyers who want simplicity and many uses; it is common on stock sites and is usually non-exclusive, so others may use the same image.
Rights-managed suits high-value or exclusive uses, because the fee follows exactly how the image is used. Royalty-free doesn't mean free of charge or free of copyright: there's a fee, the photographer keeps the copyright, and the licence still has limits.
A designer buys a royalty-free photo of a mountain lake for a client's website and later reuses it in a newsletter, both allowed by the licence.
Another client wants the same kind of image on the cover of a national magazine and on billboards, exclusively, for a year; that's priced as a rights-managed licence for those exact uses.
Write posts that bring in clients
Spotlight's Get clients mode turns a photo from a shoot into posts for every platform that say what you shoot, where you work and how to book or license from you.
Get clients is a mode of the Spotlight workspace on CAPTD's paid plans — see pricing.
Open Get clients