# 2026 UK Photography Law. KNOW YOUR RIGHTS!

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Your rights in public places Last reviewed: August 2026. This guide covers the law in England and Wales. It is general information and not legal advice. Please read the full disclaimer at the end of this article. I have been shooting commercially for well over a decade, and in that time I have been challenged in the street more times than I can count. Some of those challenges were reasonable. Most were based on a version of the law that does not exist. If you carry a camera in public in this country, it pays to know where you actually stand. This is a plain English guide to the areas that come up most often: your rights in public places, police powers, photographing children, the sites that are genuinely off limits, and the newer legislation that has landed since I first wrote about this. A fair amount has changed, so if you read the earlier version of this article, this one replaces it. In England and Wales you can generally photograph people and buildings from a public place. No permit is needed, and that applies to the public and the press alike. There is no general law that says you must ask permission before pressing the shutter. That is the starting point, not the whole picture. Two things sit alongside it. The first is privacy. Even in a public space, a person can have a reasonable expectation of privacy depending on what they are doing. Somebody going into a clinic, a child in a playground, a person in obvious distress. There is a difference between what you are entitled to do and what you should do, and the courts have been prepared to look at that distinction. Use your judgement. The second is what you do with the picture afterwards. Taking it and publishing it are two separate questions. If you intend to sell an image, license it, or use it to promote a product or service, you may need a model release from the people in it and permission from the property owner. That is a contract and consent issue rather than a criminal one, but it is the thing most likely to cause you a problem in practice. Police powers, stop and search, and photography Police officers cannot stop you photographing in a public place simply because they, or somebody else, would rather you did not. They need a power, and the power has to fit the circumstances. Just as importantly, officers have no general power to make you delete images or hand over your memory cards. Seizure or deletion needs lawful authority, and in most street situations that authority is not there. The Terrorism Act 2000 Section 44 used to allow stop and search without suspicion in designated areas. It was heavily criticised, and in 2010 the European Court of Human Rights found in Gillan and Quinton v United Kingdom that it breached the right to private life under Article 8. It was repealed and replaced by the narrower section 47A. That history matters less now than it did, but you will still hear section 44 quoted at you by people who have not kept up. Section 43 remains in force and is the one you are more likely to meet. It allows an officer to stop and search a person they reasonably suspect to be a terrorist. Reasonable suspicion is a real threshold, and it is not met by the mere act of taking photographs. Section 58A and photographing police officers Section 58A covers eliciting or publishing information about members of the armed forces, the intelligence services or the police that is likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism. It is not a ban on photographing police officers. Photographing officers going about their normal duties, including at protests and incidents, should not on its own give rise to an arrest under this section. There would need to be a reasonable suspicion that the images were intended to assist terrorism. Protests and the Public Order Act 2023 This is one of the more useful additions since I last wrote about this subject. Section 17 of the Public Order Act 2023 came into force on 2 July 2023. It provides that a constable may not exercise a police power for the sole purp

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