Image copyright checker: does this image need a license?

Almost every image is protected by copyright from the moment it's made, so the useful question is who owns it. Drop the image in the box: the reverse image search shows whether it's on a paid stock site, a free-license source or many other pages, with the links, so you can see who sells it or what its license says. If you can't find an owner, treat it as protected.

Where the same image appears online, and one of four verdicts: paid stock found (it's on Getty, iStock, Shutterstock, Alamy, Adobe Stock or a similar site, so it needs a license unless you bought one or it's in the public domain: agencies also sell copies of old archive photos), free source found (it's on Wikimedia, Unsplash, Pexels or a similar source: check that page's license and credit terms), widely published (it's on 10 or more sites and we couldn't find its owner: treat it as licensed) or not found (nowhere online, or only on a few ordinary sites with no owner named). Every verdict links to the pages behind it.

No, and it never says so. Finding an image on a stock site proves it's licensed stock; not finding it proves nothing (the owner may simply not have published it where search engines look). If you didn't make an image and can't show a license for it, ask whoever did.

On our test of 30 recent stock and news photos from publishers who credit their sources, it flagged 27 as needing a license (all 10 news photos), and it flagged none of 30 photos that had never been posted online. It recognizes some free images less well: 11 of 15 Wikimedia photos came back as free sources. The engine is Google Cloud Vision's web search by image.

Yes: enter the site's address and it reads the sitemap (or follows the site's links), then traces each image. Free scans take up to 20 images; Pro scans take up to 1000 and can watch 3 sites every week, emailing you when a new image is on a paid stock site or widely published. Please only scan sites you run or work on.

Yes. Add Trace Any Image as a connector in Claude and ask where an image is from, whether it's stock, or to check your site. Claude can't search the web by image on its own; this gives it that. Everything also works here in your browser without Claude.

Trace Any Image isn't a people search. When an image's subject is a person, it still gives the verdict and any stock or free-source pages, and how many pages carry the image, but not the list of those pages.

Each image traced counts once: the free plan includes 20 images a month, Pro 1,000. An image traced again within 7 days doesn't count again, and a trace that fails doesn't count.

Uploaded images are deleted 24 hours after upload. Reports keep the verdicts and links for 30 days so you can share them, but never show an uploaded image. Report links are unguessable and not indexed.

No. It's evidence of where an image appears online. Whether you may use an image depends on the license you hold; for a demand letter, talk to a lawyer.