To audit your website for copyrighted images, list the images your site publishes, check each one for ownership signals (copyright metadata, watermarks, reverse image search matches), match what you find against your license records, then keep, license, replace or remove each image and document the decision. This guide walks through each step, by hand and with a scanner. If you want the shorter version of the checks themselves, see how to check whether your site's images are copyrighted.

Images pile up fast: blog posts, product pages, landing pages, team bios, background graphics. And many of them weren't uploaded by you. They came from contractors, interns, past employees, freelance designers, or that agency you worked with two years ago. Often nobody kept records, and nobody thought to ask where the images came from.

Meanwhile, stock agencies and the firms that work for them use software to find their images on the web. An audit is basic risk management: it tells you which images you can show a license for, and which ones need a decision.

Why You Need a Website Copyright Audit

Most business websites have gaps in their image records. Here's why:

Staff turnover creates blind spots. That marketing coordinator who left last year? They uploaded dozens of blog images. Do you know where they sourced them? Do you have the license files?

Contractors cut corners. Not all of them, but enough. A freelancer on a tight deadline might grab a stock preview image "temporarily" and never replace it. Or they download something from a free wallpaper site that's actually hosting pirated content.

"Free" images often aren't. Creative Commons licenses have conditions. Unsplash changed its terms. Pixabay images sometimes turn out to be copyrighted works uploaded without permission. Even well-intentioned sourcing can go wrong.

The costs are lopsided. Licensing an image up front is usually cheap. A claim afterwards usually costs more: at the least a retroactive license fee, and if it goes to court in the US, statutory damages under 17 U.S.C. 504(c) range from $750 to $30,000 per work, up to $150,000 for willful infringement, for works registered in time (17 U.S.C. 412). An audit closes that gap before someone else finds the image for you.

The Manual Audit Process (Step by Step)

If you want to do a thorough website copyright audit by hand, here's the process. Be warned: this is time-consuming. But understanding the manual approach helps you appreciate what automated tools handle for you.

Step 1: Crawl Your Site to Collect All Image URLs

Before you can check anything, you need a complete inventory of every image on your site. There are a few ways to do this:

Screaming Frog SEO Spider can crawl your site and export a list of all image URLs. Filter by file type (JPG, PNG, WebP, SVG) and export the list.
Your XML sitemap might include image entries if your CMS generates them (WordPress with Yoast does this).
Browser dev tools: On smaller sites, you can open each page, right-click, inspect, and look at the Network tab filtered to images. This doesn't scale, but it works for a 10-page site.

The goal is a spreadsheet with every image URL on your site. Expect more image files than pages once you count thumbnails, resized copies and theme graphics.

Step 2: Check Image Metadata

Every digital image can carry embedded metadata, including copyright notices, photographer names, camera information, and software tags. This data lives in the EXIF, IPTC, and XMP fields inside the file.

For each image (or at least the ones that look like photographs rather than icons or UI elements), download the file and run it through a metadata viewer. PixGuard offers a free metadata viewer that shows the EXIF, IPTC and XMP fields in an image file.

What you're looking for:

Copyright fields containing a photographer name or agency (e.g., "Copyright 2024 Getty Images")
Creator or Artist tags identifying the original photographer
Professional camera metadata like Canon EOS R5 or Nikon Z9, which suggests the image came from a professional shoot
Software tags like Adobe Lightroom or Capture One, which indicate a professional editing workflow

If you see any of these, the image very likely came from a professional source. Make sure you have a license on file, or plan to replace it.

Step 3: Check for Watermarks

Stock agencies put visible watermarks on their preview images (the classic diagonal text overlay, or a logo) to prevent unauthorized use. Some images also carry invisible marks, but agency enforcement mainly relies on visual fingerprinting, so a missing watermark doesn't mean an image is licensed.

Run suspicious images through PixGuard's free watermark detection tool. It looks for visible watermarks and flags unusual pixel patterns that can indicate hidden marks, which is not proof of a watermark. If it flags a watermark, check the image's source and license before you decide what to do.

Step 4: Reverse Image Search Suspicious Images

For images that don't have obvious metadata or watermarks but still look professionally shot, run a reverse image search. Google Lens, TinEye, and Yandex Images can all show you where else an image appears online.

If the image shows up on Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, iStockPhoto, or Alamy, it's a stock image sold under license. Check whether you actually have a license for it.

Keep in mind that reverse image search has limitations. It can miss images that have been heavily cropped, color-shifted, or flipped, and images that aren't widely indexed. A match also only tells you where else an image appears, not whether you hold a license.

Step 5: Cross-Reference with Your License Records

For every image you've flagged as potentially copyrighted, check your records. Do you have a license file, a receipt from a stock photo purchase, or a signed release from a photographer?

If your organization doesn't have a centralized system for tracking image licenses, this step will be painful. That's a problem worth fixing. Going forward, create a shared folder or spreadsheet where every licensed image is logged with its source, license type, and any usage restrictions.

Step 6: Document Everything

For every image on your site, record what you found:

Image URL and the page it appears on
Metadata findings (copyright tags, camera info, software)
Watermark scan results
Reverse image search results
License status (verified, missing, unknown)
Action taken (kept, removed, replaced, license purchased)

This documentation helps you later. If a stock agency sends a demand letter for an image you've already verified and licensed, your audit log helps you show that quickly.

The Automated Approach: Scan Your Website for Copyright Issues

The manual process works, but it takes hours for a small site and days for a large one. If you have a site with hundreds or thousands of images, manual auditing simply isn't practical.

PixGuard's website scanner automates much of the checking:

1. Enter your URL. Enter your homepage, or the page you want the crawl to start from. The scan follows links on the same host from there, so it isn't limited to one section of your site. You can try the free check on one page first: enter a page URL and we check the 3 largest images on that page, up to 3 times a day. Uploads and 30 image scans need a free account.

2. PixGuard crawls your site and scores the images it finds. A website scan follows links across up to 50 pages on the same host and checks the images it finds, up to your plan's per-scan limit (10 new images per scan on Free, 500 on Pro, 2,000 on Business). Each image is checked for copyright fields in EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata, visible watermarks, matches against a database of reference image fingerprints, and signs of AI generation.

3. Get a risk report with severity scores. Each image receives a 0 to 100 risk score based on what the scan found. The report groups findings by severity so you can see at a glance how many high-risk, medium-risk, and low-risk images are on your site.

4. Prioritize by risk level. Instead of checking 500 images one by one, you can start with the ones that scored highest. The report shows which images were flagged and why, so you know where to look first.

A scan won't replace your judgment or your license records, but it does the repetitive part: reading metadata, looking for watermarks and comparing fingerprints across many images at once. It doesn't record which page each image was found on, so add that to your spreadsheet as you work through the results.

What to Do with Your Findings

Once you have your audit results, whether from a manual review or an automated scan, sort your findings into three categories and act accordingly.

High Risk: Remove or License First

Images in this category have strong signals that they came from a stock agency or another rights holder:

Visible stock-agency watermark detected
A fingerprint or reverse image search match to a stock photo
Metadata explicitly identifies a stock agency as the copyright holder

Action: Unless you can find a license for them, take these images down. If you need the image, purchase a proper license before re-uploading it.

Medium Risk: Verify License Exists

These images show signs of professional origin but aren't confirmed matches to stock libraries:

Copyright metadata present with a photographer's name
Shot on professional camera equipment
Professional editing software tags in metadata
High production quality but no stock match found

Action: Check your license records. If you can confirm a valid license, document it and move on. If you can't find a license, treat it as high risk and either track down the original source to purchase a license or replace the image.

Low Risk: Document as Checked

Images with no copyright indicators detected:

No copyright metadata
No visible watermarks
No stock photo matches
Likely user-generated, screenshot, or simple graphic

Action: Log these as reviewed. No signals isn't the same as permission, so note where each image came from if you know. Having them documented as checked is still valuable if questions come up later.

How Often Should You Audit?

A single audit is a good start, but websites change constantly. New images go up every week on active sites. Here's a reasonable schedule:

Quarterly for sites with regular content updates (blogs, news sites, e-commerce with rotating inventory)
After every redesign or migration, since redesigns are when images get swapped out hastily and new assets get added without proper vetting
When onboarding new content creators, whether that's a new marketing hire, a freelance writer, or an agency partner. Audit what they add during their first month
Immediately after receiving any copyright notice, because where there's one problem, there may be more

Website Copyright Audit Checklist

Use this as a quick reference for your next audit:

Crawl the site and export a complete list of all image URLs
Categorize images by type (photographs, illustrations, icons, screenshots, UI elements)
Run all photographs through metadata extraction and check for copyright tags
Check for visible watermarks
Reverse image search any image that looks professionally produced
Cross-reference flagged images against your license records
Remove, replace or license any high-risk images
Purchase licenses for images you want to keep but don't have rights to
Document every finding with image URL, page location, and action taken
Store all license files in a centralized, accessible location
Set a calendar reminder for your next audit date
Establish an image sourcing policy for anyone who uploads content to your site

Stop Guessing. Start Scanning.

Manual audits work, but they're slow on a site with hundreds of images, and it's easy to miss a fingerprint match or a copyright field by eye. Automated scanning handles the repetitive checks so you can spend your time on the images that need a decision.

PixGuard flags images with copyright risk signals, from copyright metadata to visible watermarks and fingerprint matches, and gives each one a 0 to 100 risk score with the reasons behind it. A free account includes 30 image scans, valid for 30 days; each site scan crawls up to 50 pages and checks up to 10 new images on the free plan.

Start your audit with a free account. No credit card required.