Reverse Image Search

A leak rarely carries your name

Whoever reposts your work has no reason to credit you, and every reason not to. A search for your username finds the posts that mention you. It cannot find the ones that do not.

Captions get stripped

A file saved and uploaded again loses the username, the watermark line and the link it came with. The picture survives all of it.

New names, same picture

Forums and file hosts rename what they post — a number, a date, somebody else’s handle. Searching for text looks for the one thing that changed.

The picture is the evidence

A match by image is your file, found somewhere it should not be. That is what a takedown notice has to show.

How It Works

Add a reference photo

In Settings → Profiles, upload one or two pictures you own — JPEG, PNG, WebP or GIF, up to 25 MB. They are search material and nothing else: nothing is published anywhere.

Every scan searches by picture

On a paid plan the image search runs as part of each scan, beside the name-based sources: automatically every day, plus any scan you start yourself. Up to two reference photos are used per scan.

Matches arrive as findings

What is found lands in Results with the page it sat on, a screenshot and a SHA-256 hash of the capture. A reviewer checks the notice, and Teker sends it in your name as your authorised agent.

What it finds, and what it does not

This is the kind of feature that is easy to oversell. Here is its honest edge.

It finds resized and re-encoded copies

The same picture at another size, saved again at another quality, served by another site. That is the common case, and it is the case this catches.

It does not find crops, mirrors or faces

A cropped detail, a horizontally flipped copy, or a different photograph of the same person are not matched. Shield does not do face recognition and does not claim to.

It needs a reference photo and a paid plan

With no reference picture on the profile there is nothing to search with, and the scan says so rather than quietly skipping it. The free plan searches by name only.

Where your reference photo goes

To a search provider outside the EU

A reverse-image search is a request to a search provider, and the one Shield uses is in the United States. Your reference photo is sent there to run it. This is in the privacy notice, and it is here as well, because it is something to decide knowingly rather than discover.

Kept with your profile, deleted when you say

The photo stays with the profile you added it to. Delete it in Settings and the file itself is deleted, not only the record of it.

Questions

Do I have to upload a nude for this to work?

No. Any picture you own works, because the search matches the file rather than the subject. A clothed photo from the same set is a common choice.

Is image search included in the free plan?

No. It belongs to every paid plan, together with Telegram, the file hosts and the adult tubes. The free plan searches the name-based sources.

Will it find my face in a photo I never uploaded?

No. It looks for copies of the picture you gave it. Finding a different photograph of you would be face recognition, which Shield does not do.

How many reference photos should I add?

Two is the working number: a scan seeds the image search with up to two of them. More on the profile does no harm, but they are not all searched at once.

What happens when it finds something?

The same as with any other finding. Evidence is captured and kept, a reviewer checks the notice, and Teker sends it in your name. Each step is visible in the app.