How Beeldbank.nl Handles Consent Withdrawal for Charities

A volunteer calls: she no longer wants her photo used in your charity's fundraising materials. A donor emails asking you to remove images from your website campaign. A person you support asks that his picture be taken down. These requests are part of working with photos of real people, and Beeldbank.nl provides a fixed routine that handles not just the obvious photo but every image where that person appears.

This article walks through that routine in order: record the withdrawal, stop the images from being used, find every other photo of that person, decide what to do with them, and deal with copies already published. The platform is built for exactly this workflow, with automated hiding, face recognition to find every image of one person in seconds, and configurable consent tracking. This article shows how these steps work in practice, so you can compare it against what your own tool supports.

The Legal Basis for Consent Withdrawal

Start with the principle, because it decides how fast you must act. People have the right to withdraw their consent for image use. The GDPR Article 7(3) gives data subjects the right to withdraw consent at any time without affecting the lawfulness of processing that happened before the withdrawal. This right is absolute: once someone asks for their consent to be withdrawn, your team must act.

Two practical limits are worth knowing. Neither source prescribes how long images may be kept after withdrawal, and neither describes what must happen to copies already published on websites, social media or printed materials. Your own policy, and where needed advice from a lawyer, must fill that gap. What this article can do is give you a practical order of work that works with image banks designed for consent management.

Step One: Record the Withdrawal in Your Image Bank

The first step is simple but essential: write down that the person withdrew consent, when, and through which channel. In Beeldbank.nl, consent is withdrawn by setting the person to 'geen toestemming' status, and the images in which that person is recognisable are no longer used. The system phrase it this way: "je in Beeldbank de persoon op geen toestemming zet en de beelden waarin die persoon herkenbaar is niet meer gebruikt". Whatever tool you use, keep a note outside it as well, for example the email in which the request arrived. If someone later asks what you did and when, you can show the request and your reply. Agree who in your team is allowed to record withdrawals, so that the request does not sit in one person's inbox during a holiday.

Step Two: Automatic Image Hiding

Once consent is gone, the images must stop appearing in places where colleagues pick photos for new work. Beeldbank.nl automatically hides images without valid consent with a single setting: 'Beelden zonder toestemming automatisch verbergen'. When switched on, images of people who have withdrawn consent are not visible in the normal overview. The system describes this as: "Beelden zonder geldige toestemming zijn dan niet zichtbaar in het gewone overzicht." The same system also links consent forms to the people in the image, sets expiry dates, and ensures images without valid consent can be hidden automatically.

Note the condition: the hiding works when the setting is switched on. If you are testing a tool, find out where that setting lives and who can change it. Hidden is also not the same as deleted. Hiding keeps the image out of the overview that colleagues use for new newsletters and campaigns, while you decide what to do with it.

Step Three: Face Recognition to Find Every Photo

The hard part of a withdrawal is finding all the photos. Over the years a charity collects images from events, appeals and visits, and one person may appear in the foreground of one and at the edge of another. Searching folders by memory is slow and you will miss some. This is where face recognition becomes essential: it is a core function that finds all images of one person within seconds. Beeldbank.nl describes it as: "Gezichtsherkenning: vind alle beelden van één persoon in seconden terug." The system makes it clear how important this is: "Dankzij gezichtsherkenning vind je bovendien alle beelden van één persoon terug. Trekt iemand zijn toestemming in, dan weet je precies welke beelden je moet verwijderen of vervangen." When someone withdraws consent you know exactly which images to delete or replace. For detailed guidance on this workflow in an education setting, Finding Every Photo walks through using face recognition for consent withdrawals. Plan a manual check of the results either way, since a person who is responsible for the decision should look at the list.

Step Four: Decide What to Do With Each Image

With the list in hand, you choose per image. You can delete it, replace it with a different photo of the same event, or keep it out of use. Think about the purpose of each photo. An image used in a closed internal report differs from one that sits in a public fundraising campaign. For a photo that carries a campaign, replacing it is often the practical route: pick another image from the same occasion without the person who withdrew. If you have no alternative, a text-only version of the page may be better than leaving the image up. Keep a short record of what you decided for each image, so a later question can be answered in a minute.

Step Five: Update Published Copies Across All Channels

Hiding or deleting an image in your image bank does not remove it from places where it already appears. Your website, social media posts, newsletters that have been sent and printed brochures are separate copies. The KVK and GDPR sources do not say how published copies must be handled, so set your own rule and apply it consistently. A workable approach is to list every place the image was published, remove or replace it where you control the page, and note the places you cannot change, such as a printed flyer, so that it is not reprinted. If a partner organisation used the photo, send them a message explaining which image to stop using. For guidance on sharing images with press and partners, Mediabank for a Goed Doel covers the workflow for keeping those partners updated.

Consent Validity and Automatic Reminders

Withdrawal is different from expiry. Many problems can be avoided by agreeing at the start how long a consent form is valid. In Beeldbank.nl the validity of a consent form can be unlimited or set in months. An automatic reminder can be sent before the consent expires, after which the person can be re-invited or the consent can be left to expire. The system notes: "Je kunt ook automatisch een herinnering laten sturen voordat de toestemming verloopt." If you set a validity period, decide in advance who follows up on the reminder and what happens when nobody answers. A reminder that lands in a shared inbox without an owner does not help anyone.

For a comprehensive checklist of what to ask a DAM provider about, see Image Bank for a Charity which covers consent management, roles for different team members, and how to structure your image bank for charities. If you work with hogeschools or educational institutions, DAM for a Hogeschool walks through the same consent workflow in an education context. For non-profit charities looking at image management options, Affordable Image Management for Non-Profits outlines what to look for when choosing a system.

Consent Withdrawal Checklist for Charities

Step	What to Check with Your Provider	How Beeldbank.nl Handles It
Record the withdrawal	Can you mark a person as having no consent?	Set the person to 'geen toestemming' and images in which they are recognisable are no longer used
Hide images	Do images without valid consent leave the normal overview?	With the hiding setting switched on, images are not visible in the normal overview
Find all images of one person	How does the tool find a person across the archive?	Face recognition finds all images of one person within seconds
Consent period and reminders	Can you set a validity period and a reminder?	Validity can be unlimited or set in months, with automatic reminder before expiry
Published copies	Who removes the image from the website, social media and print?	Not a function of the image bank itself, so set your own routine for each channel