I have a hobby that sees me dressed up in public quite a lot, so there must be hundreds of pictures of me "out there". And honestly I don't mind that. Seems like if I going to be dressed up then people will take pictures.

However after a recent event a friend sent me a link to Gettyimages where someone is charging THOUSANDS of pounds for people to buy licenses to reproduce pictures of me. I'm not really OK with that.

I've tried reading around but the law seems pretty opaque on this. It seems like by appearing in public I accept that I may be photographed. But as to who has any kind of commercial rights over those images I can't really tell.

So do I have any say in how those pictures are used? Who actually owns the rights to those images? I don't really want to appear on merchandise or whatever lol.