How to Check If an Image Is Copyrighted Before Using It Online

Finding an image is not the same as being allowed to use it. That distinction sounds obvious stated plainly, but it's the single most common mistake behind copyright disputes involving bloggers, small businesses and website owners — someone finds an image through a search engine, on a competitor's site, or on social media, assumes that because it was easy to find and easy to save, it must be available to use, and publishes it. The image was, in the overwhelming majority of cases, never free to use at all.

This guide walks through the actual process of determining whether an image is copyrighted, who owns it, and what — if anything — you're permitted to do with it, before you publish.

Why Most Images Online Are Automatically Copyrighted

Under the Berne Convention, which governs copyright law across most of the world, copyright protection attaches to an original creative work the moment it is fixed in a tangible form — no registration, no notice, no copyright symbol required. A photograph is protected the instant the shutter closes. An illustration is protected the moment it's saved as a file.

This means the default legal status of any image you find online is "protected by copyright, all rights reserved," unless something specific indicates otherwise. There is no such thing as an image being "free by default" simply because no copyright notice is visible, and the absence of a watermark, a copyright symbol, or a visible attribution requirement tells you nothing about the actual legal status of the work.

Why Google Images Is a Discovery Tool, Not a Licence

Google Images, and reverse image search tools generally, exist to help you find where an image appears and what it looks like at different resolutions. None of that constitutes permission to use it. Google's own image search interface includes a filterable "usage rights" option, which is genuinely useful as a starting filter — but it relies on metadata and page-level signals that aren't independently verified by Google, and it has been documented to surface images inaccurately labeled as reusable. Treat it as a lead to investigate, not as proof of licensing status.

The same applies to any search engine or social platform: appearing in search results, being shared widely, or being embeddable through a platform's own sharing tools says nothing about whether the underlying image is licensed for your intended use.

How to Identify the Original Source of an Image

The practical starting point is tracing the image backward to where it actually originated, rather than accepting the page where you happened to encounter it as the source.

A useful way to think about this: the page an image appears on and the entity that owns the copyright to that image are frequently two entirely different things. A blog might embed a stock photo it licensed from a photographer. A news site might run a wire photo it licensed from an agency. A social media account might repost an image with no rights to it whatsoever. Finding an image on a given page tells you where you saw it, not who made it or who has the legal right to authorize its reuse.

Consider a realistic scenario: while researching a piece, a writer comes across an image while browsing a page or search result associated with Crazy Tower kasyno. The fact that the image appears there doesn't establish who created it, whether that site owns the copyright, whether the site itself has permission to display it, or whether a third party is free to reuse it. It could be an original commissioned photograph, a licensed stock image, an illustration by an in-house designer, or something reused from elsewhere without clear rights at all — and there is no way to know which from the image's mere presence on the page. The only way to find out is to trace the image to a documented source and look for explicit licensing information, exactly as you would for an image found on any other website.

Checking the Website Where the Image Appears

Before concluding an image is unusable or spending time on a reverse search, check the hosting page itself for direct signals: a footer copyright notice, a dedicated "media" or "press" page, an "image credits" section at the bottom of an article, or a licensing/terms page linked from the site's footer. Many stock libraries, museums, and news organizations post explicit reuse terms exactly for this reason, and sites that license their visual content from third parties will often say so directly, since it protects them from liability if it's unclear.

If the site provides no licensing information anywhere, that is itself informative — it means you have no documented basis to assume the image is reusable, and the investigation needs to continue elsewhere rather than being closed out as "not shown, therefore fine."

Using Reverse Image Search to Find the Original

Reverse image search (Google Images' camera icon, TinEye, or Bing's visual search) searches for visually similar or identical images across the indexed web, which is genuinely useful for two things: finding the earliest known appearance of an image (a reasonable, though not conclusive, signal of where it originated), and finding other copies that might include licensing information the copy you found doesn't.

TinEye specifically sorts results by the earliest indexed date, which is often the fastest way to identify a probable original source when an image has been copied across multiple sites without attribution. None of these tools give a definitive legal answer on their own — they narrow down where to look for one.

What Image Metadata Can and Cannot Prove

Image files often carry EXIF or IPTC metadata — camera settings, capture date, sometimes a copyright field or creator name entered by whoever exported the file. This can be a useful lead: a populated copyright field naming a specific photographer or agency is worth following up on directly.

What metadata cannot do is serve as reliable proof of anything. It's trivially stripped by many platforms during upload (most social media sites strip EXIF data automatically), trivially edited by anyone with basic software, and trivially absent from images that were screenshotted, converted, or re-saved at any point in their history. Treat metadata as one lead among several, never as a conclusive answer on its own.

Understanding Creative Commons Licences

Creative Commons licences are a mechanism a copyright holder uses to grant certain permissions in advance, rather than requiring case-by-case requests. Critically, there are several distinct CC licences, and they are not interchangeable — each one grants a different, specific set of permissions.

CC BY (Attribution) — the most permissive standard CC licence. You can use, modify, and even use the work commercially, provided you credit the original creator as specified.

CC BY-SA (Attribution-ShareAlike) — same as CC BY, but any derivative work you create and distribute must be released under the same licence. This "share-alike" condition carries forward to your own output, which matters if you're building something you intend to license differently.

CC BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial) — permits use and modification with attribution, but explicitly excludes commercial use. If your website carries ads, sells anything, or otherwise generates revenue, this licence very likely does not cover that use, and "non-commercial" is interpreted broadly by many rights holders and courts, not narrowly.

CC BY-ND (Attribution-NoDerivatives) — permits redistribution with attribution, but explicitly forbids modifying, cropping, recoloring, or otherwise altering the work. The image must be used as-is.

CC0 — the creator has waived copyright entirely, to the fullest extent the law allows, placing the work as close to the public domain as a licence can achieve. No attribution is legally required, though many communities consider it courteous.

The mistake to avoid here is treating "Creative Commons" as a single, uniform category meaning "free to use." It is a family of licences with meaningfully different restrictions, and using a CC BY-NC image on a monetized site, or modifying a CC BY-ND image, is a licence violation even though the image is technically "Creative Commons licensed."

Public Domain Images

Public domain is a distinct legal status from any Creative Commons licence, not a synonym for one. A work enters the public domain when its copyright term has fully expired (which varies by jurisdiction, but is commonly life of the author plus 70 years in much of the world), when the creator explicitly and formally dedicates it to the public domain, or in certain jurisdictions, when it was created by a government body under specific statutory provisions (US federal government works, for example, are generally not copyrighted).

A public domain work carries no restrictions at all — no attribution requirement, no commercial-use restriction, no derivative-works restriction — because there is no active copyright to attach conditions to. This makes it meaningfully more permissive than even a CC0 image in some jurisdictions, since CC0 is a licence waiver rather than a change in the work's fundamental legal status, though in practical terms the two behave almost identically for most reuse purposes.

Copyright-Free Versus Royalty-Free: A Critical Distinction

These terms get used interchangeably in casual conversation, and that's a mistake worth correcting directly. Copyright-free should mean a work genuinely has no copyright attached — public domain or CC0, as covered above. Royalty-free means something different: you pay a licence fee once (or nothing, on some free stock sites) and then don't owe ongoing royalties per use — but the work is still copyrighted, and the licence still carries specific terms about how, where, and how often you can use it.

A huge portion of "free stock photo" sites (Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay) operate on royalty-free licences with their own specific terms — most permit broad commercial use without attribution, but it's still worth reading the actual licence text on the specific platform, since terms differ between them and have changed over time on more than one of these services.

Attribution Requirements in Practice

When a licence requires attribution, the safest approach is to include, at minimum, the creator's name, the title of the work if given, a link back to the original source, and the specific licence under which it's used (with a link to the licence's legal text). Creative Commons itself recommends this format, often abbreviated as "TASL" (Title, Author, Source, Licence). Vague attribution like "image via internet" or a generic "photo credit" with no verifiable source does not satisfy most licence terms and offers no real protection if the licensing claim is later challenged.

Commercial Versus Non-Commercial Use

"Commercial use" is interpreted more broadly than most people assume. A monetized blog with display ads, an affiliate-link-driven article, a business's own marketing material, and a product listing on an e-commerce site are all generally considered commercial use — even if no direct sale of the image itself is happening. If a licence restricts commercial use and there's any doubt about whether your specific context qualifies, the safer assumption is that it does, rather than relying on a narrow interpretation that a rights holder may not share.

Derivative Works and What Counts as One

Cropping, recoloring, adding text, combining an image with other elements, or using it as a base for a new composite generally counts as creating a derivative work under most copyright frameworks. This matters directly for CC BY-ND licensed images, where derivatives are explicitly prohibited regardless of attribution — the licence permits redistribution of the work unchanged, not modification of it.

What to Do When No Licence Information Is Available

If you've traced an image to its apparent source and found no explicit licence, no public domain status, and no royalty-free stock listing, the correct default assumption is that the image is fully copyrighted and not available for reuse without direct permission. This is the position that protects you legally, even if it's less convenient than assuming otherwise.

Requesting Permission From a Copyright Holder

When an image is valuable enough to pursue and no licence is visible, contacting the rights holder directly is a legitimate and often successful path — many photographers and illustrators will grant permission for a specific use, sometimes for free, sometimes for a fee, provided they're asked. A written request should specify exactly where and how you intend to use the image (which site, whether it's commercial, whether it will be modified), and any grant of permission should be obtained in writing, not verbally or informally, so there's a documented record of what was actually agreed to.

Keeping Evidence of Licences and Permissions

Screenshot or save a copy of the licensing page, the CC licence badge, the stock site's licence terms, or the permission email at the time you use the image — not months later when a dispute arises and the original page may have changed or disappeared. A licence that was valid and visible at the time of use can be difficult to prove after the fact if the only record of it was a link that no longer resolves to the same content.

Common Mistakes Bloggers and Website Owners Make

The most frequent mistake is assuming that images found via a general search are free simply because no explicit copyright notice was visible on the page. A close second is misapplying Creative Commons licences — using an NC-licensed image commercially, or modifying an ND-licensed image, often without realizing the specific letters in the licence name carry binding restrictions. A third common error is confusing "credited" with "licensed" — crediting a source doesn't create permission where none existed; attribution satisfies a licence condition, it doesn't substitute for having a valid licence in the first place.

A Practical Checklist Before Publishing an Image

• Trace the image to its original source rather than the page where you found it

• Check the source site's footer, credits page, or licensing terms directly

• Run a reverse image search to confirm the earliest known origin and surface any additional licensing information

• Check image metadata as a lead, not as proof

• If a Creative Commons licence applies, confirm exactly which variant (BY, BY-SA, BY-NC, BY-ND, or CC0) and read what it actually permits

• Confirm public domain status through a verifiable source (expired copyright term, an explicit dedication, or documented government-work status) rather than assuming it

• Distinguish royalty-free from genuinely copyright-free before assuming a "free stock" image carries no restrictions

• If no licence is visible anywhere, treat the image as fully copyrighted by default

• If pursuing permission, get it in writing and specify your exact intended use

• Save documentation of the licence or permission at the time you use the image, not afterward

This is general information about how copyright and licensing typically work, not legal advice for a specific situation — copyright law varies by jurisdiction and the facts of individual cases can change the analysis, so a genuinely high-stakes or ambiguous case is worth a conversation with a qualified copyright attorney rather than resolving on general guidance alone.