Three ways to find copies of your artwork

You upload your image to a tool such as Google Lens or TinEye, or paste its address, and look at the pages that come back. It costs nothing, you can try variations (a crop, a different tool), and you judge every result with your own eyes. For a one-off question like “is this listing using my picture?” nothing beats it.

Its weakness is not the search, it is the habit. A search tells you what was findable at the moment you ran it. Copies appear later, on other sites, under new listings. Unless you repeat the search on a schedule, you find out about a copy the day you happen to look, which is often the day someone sends you a screenshot.

The second limit is coverage. A search tool can only show pages it has seen. A page behind a login, inside a private group or in a closed app will not appear, however good the tool is. Our step-by-step guide shows how to do this properly and keep a record.

An invisible watermark hides a small code in the pixels of the image. If the code can be read back from a file, it points to the artwork and account that produced it. That is a strong kind of evidence, because it does not depend on how the picture looks.

The catch is how fragile it is. We tested our own mark on three synthetic test images. It survived saving as PNG, JPEG at quality 85 and above, and WEBP at quality 90, and it survived a black-and-white conversion, a contrast change, a hue shift and a sepia tone. It did not survive any resize (75%, 50%, 25% or enlarging), any crop (even 90%), rotation, mirroring, a brightness change, stronger JPEG or WEBP compression, or a screenshot-like copy.

In plain words: a copy that someone has resized or cropped, which is what most reposting does, has usually lost the mark. A watermark is a useful extra signal when it is still there. It is a poor way to discover copies, and it is a poor thing to build a whole strategy on. See what an invisible watermark survives for the full list.

Monitoring is the first way, done again and again for you. The artwork is searched on a schedule and you are told if something new turns up. In TraceMyAssets the schedule is weekly or monthly on the free plan and can be daily on the paid plans. After a scheduled scan we send an email with a count and a link, and nothing else, so the email itself does not show your work.

What monitoring adds is time. A copy that appears on a Tuesday is seen on Wednesday instead of in three months. What it does not add is reach: it can only look where the underlying search can look. Our Standard scan uses Google Cloud Vision web detection, and the Deep scan asks Google Lens for matches. Whether a page is listed at all depends on what those services have indexed. We have not measured a catch rate for either, and you should be wary of anyone who quotes one without showing how they measured it.

A search result is a candidate, not a verdict. The next question is whether the picture on that page really is yours, even after it has been edited. This step is separate from finding it, and we tested it separately.

Our comparison looks at how the image looks (a perceptual hash and matching keypoints), not only at the watermark. On the three test images it recognised copies resized to 50%, recompressed, screenshot-like, recoloured, brightened, cropped to the middle 60% and placed in a room mockup, every time, including the cases where the watermark had already been destroyed. It recognised very small copies (25%), a 40% corner crop and small mockups only part of the time, so some of those will be missed. Unrelated images were never flagged.

This is why we treat the watermark as one extra signal rather than the main one, and why every result is shown as a possible match for you to review, never as proof.

• Use search by hand for questions. Something looks familiar, a customer sends a link: search by image with more than one tool and read the pages yourself.
• Use monitoring for time. It will not find everything, but it finds new copies sooner than remembering to look.
• Treat the watermark as a bonus. If a copy still carries it, that is strong evidence. If it does not, that tells you nothing about whether the copy exists.
• Keep your own evidence. Working files and a dated first publication matter more than any tool's output when you report a copy. See how to prove you made your artwork.
• Decide yourself what to do next. Start with the gentlest step. What to do when you find a copy gives a calm order.

We write this down because a blog post is where a company is most tempted to round numbers up.

• The test images are synthetic (random shapes, 1000 by 1000 pixels), three of them, not real paintings, photographs or illustrations. Real work has texture, flat areas, text and grain that behave differently.
• We tested one watermark strength, the current one. Other editing tools, quality settings and combinations of edits are unknown.
• The comparison test measures what happens once a candidate image is in hand. It does not measure whether a search service lists the page in the first place, so none of it is a catch rate for the Standard or Deep scan.
• A match is a technical signal for you to review. It is not proof of copying or of ownership.

If you want to see the same results as short tables, read what happens to a photo when it is resized or cropped.