Guide
How to reverse image search your product photos and find copies
By Josh Pigford, founder of Knockoff
To find out if someone is using your product photos, run each photo through Google Lens and read its Exact matches list, then try TinEye. Open every store or marketplace listing that comes back and check its whole gallery, because copies can sit in the extra photos rather than the main one.
Search your photos, not your brand name. A copycat listing rarely uses your name and almost always uses your pictures.
- Search the photo in Google Lens. Right-click your product photo in Chrome and choose Search with Google Lens, or use Search by image on google.com. Switch to the Exact matches list.
- Run the same photo through TinEye. Upload the photo or paste its link at tineye.com. TinEye finds exact and altered copies, including cropped, resized and edited ones.
- Open every listing that comes back. Skip your own pages and your retailers. On every other store or marketplace listing, open the full gallery and the variant photos, not just the main image.
- Save the page before you report it. Take a screenshot, keep the page link and save the images. After a notice, a seller can pull the product or delete the image files.
- Report it through the platform. Send a copyright notice through the platform's own form, with a link to each page that uses your photo.
How to reverse image search a product photo with Google Lens
Start on your own product page. In Chrome, right-click the photo and choose Search with Google Lens. In any other browser, go to google.com, click Search by image, and upload the file, drag it in, or paste the image's link.
Then switch lists. Lens opens on its All view, and the tab you want is Exact matches, the pages that carry the photo itself. When we ran an Allbirds shoe photo from allbirds.com through Lens in October 2026, the first view was shopping cards for other Allbirds shoes, and the Exact matches list began with Allbirds' own regional sites. Expect the same: your own store and your retailers come first, so read past them. Every other store or marketplace in that list is a listing to open.
Search your best sellers first, and the photos that cost the most to shoot. A few hero shots searched well beat a whole catalog searched badly.
Reverse image search tools for product photos: Google Lens, TinEye and Bing
Use two. Google Lens and TinEye search different indexes and match photos differently, so a copy one misses can turn up in the other.
| Tool | How to search | What it finds |
|---|---|---|
| Google Lens | Search by image on google.com, or right-click a photo in Chrome | Websites with the image or a similar image, plus shopping results |
| TinEye | Upload, paste a link or drag a photo in at tineye.com | Exact and altered copies, including cropped, color adjusted, resized, heavily edited or slightly rotated ones |
| Bing Visual Search | The camera icon in Bing Images, then drag, upload or paste | Pages that use the image, and related images |
TinEye's index holds over 86.3 billion images, and it's free for non-commercial use. Search a clean copy of your photo: on a visibly watermarked image, TinEye may search for the watermark instead. The dates it shows are when TinEye found a copy, not when the copy went up, so they don't prove you published first.
TinEye won't pick out a seller who photographed your product again. It "cannot find different images with the same people or things in them".
Checking marketplace listings for copies of your product photos
Open the whole gallery on every listing, variant photos included. On one Walmart listing we checked in August 2026, the main image was a composite that matched none of the brand's photos, and six of the brand's own photos sat unchanged in the variant gallery.
When a hit is another store, look through the rest of that store. A Lens search found one of a brand's photos on a single page, and the store behind it had copied 22 of that brand's photos onto every product page. Our free copycat store checker compares the product photos on your store and the one you suspect.
A hit isn't always a copy. Marketplace pages carry "you may also like" rows, and we've seen a stranger's Etsy listing show our product in one. The page carried the photo, but the listing didn't use it. What counts is the listing's own gallery.
Put the two photos side by side before you report anything. Copies get re-saved, filtered, watermarked, copied in part or re-laid onto a different-size square, so they don't always look identical, and two different products shot on plain white can look alike at a glance.
Image monitoring tools: Pixsy, Copytrack and TinEye Alerts
These services monitor the web for your images.
- Pixsy calls itself "an online service that allows photographers to track their images". Its free plan watches 500 images with no takedown notices, and Personal is $19 a month, billed monthly, for 2,000 images and 20 takedown notices a month. It charges 50% of the recovery, and only when it resolves a case you submit. Its help center says its law firms "often will likely not take on cases" when the website is "hosted directly on a cookie-cutter platform like Wix, Weebly, or Shopify", though you can still send a takedown notice through Pixsy.
- Copytrack calls itself "a rights clearance platform". Its settlement gives the image user two options: pay compensation and remove the image, or buy a one-year post-license.
- TinEye Alerts is TinEye's "corporate and enterprise" service, with daily reports on where your images appear and no price listed.
How to report stolen product photos on Shopify and other stores
Save the page before you report it. After one of our notices, a seller pulled the product, and its page still showed nine images, two of them exact copies of our customer's photos. After the seller's counter-notice, the two image files holding those copies were deleted. A screenshot, the page link and your own copy of each image are what you still have once the listing changes.
Then make sure the photo is yours to claim, which isn't a given if a freelancer shot it, and report it to the platform that hosts the copy. For a Shopify store, Shopify calls its online form "the most efficient way" to send a copyright notice, and it wants a link to each page with your photo: "A general shop link will not be accepted." Our Shopify DMCA takedown guide goes through the form.
Anywhere else, the notice goes to the platform's designated agent, the contact it has named to receive copyright notices. Either way, it has to include a statement, under penalty of perjury, that you're authorized to act for the owner. The takedown notice template explains every part, and the notice generator fills one in from your details. For copies on Temu or SHEIN, start with where those reports go, and if a copy comes back after it's removed, read what to do about relisted copies.
How to monitor your product photos on Shopify stores, eBay, Walmart and Temu
An hour a month of reverse image searching covers your hero shots, not your catalog, and a copy can run for four weeks before you see it. Knockoff runs this check for Shopify brands every day, across the whole catalog. Connect your store, sign one Letter of Authorization (it lets Knockoff file on your behalf), and Knockoff looks for copies of your photos on Shopify stores, eBay, Walmart and Temu. A copy counts only when your photo is in the seller's own listing gallery, so look-alikes and "you may also like" rows never become a takedown. Knockoff files the takedown on each confirmed copy as your authorized agent, then checks the removed listing every day for 90 days and files again if your photo comes back.
It's one plan at $799 a month with no contract. To see whether your photos are out there now, run a free scan of 20 of your products.
Questions
Is my product photo protected by copyright if I never registered it? +
Yes. The US Copyright Office says a work is protected the moment you create it and save it in any lasting form, like a photo file, and registration is voluntary. You do have to register a US work before you can sue over it.
Who owns product photos a freelance photographer took? +
The photographer, unless they signed a written transfer to you, or the photos count as a work made for hire, which for a freelancer takes a signed agreement and a work in one of nine categories the law lists. Photos your own employee took as part of the job are yours.
More on protecting your photos: how to copyright product photos and what to do when someone copies your whole website.
