How to remove your photo from a website

Find the company that hosts the site

A website’s domain name and its hosting are usually separate businesses. The registrar sold the name; the host runs the server where the page and your photo actually sit. The host is the one with the duty that matters here: under 17 U.S.C. § 512(c), a service provider keeps its protection from liability for what its customers post by removing material promptly once it receives a valid notice.

Our host lookup reads the site’s network records and tells you which company serves it. Two complications come up often:

• The site is behind a proxy or CDN. Services such as Cloudflare sit in front of many sites and hide the real host. They generally do not remove content they do not host, but they run abuse processes that forward a complaint to the host and can tell you who it is.
• The image is served from somewhere else. A page on one site can display an image stored on another server or a content-delivery network. Look at the image file’s own address; that server’s operator may be the one to notify.

Find the host’s designated agent

A service provider that wants the § 512 safe harbor has to designate an agent to receive notices and register that agent with the US Copyright Office (§ 512(c)(2)). The Copyright Office keeps a public directory of these agents. Registrations must be renewed every three years under the Office’s rules (37 C.F.R. § 201.38), so check the current entry rather than an address someone posted years ago.

Many hosts also publish a copyright or abuse page with a web form. Where a provider names a form for notices, use it; where it names an email address, send to that. A notice to a general sales or support inbox may never reach the people who act on it.

Write a notice with all six required parts

The statute lists what a notice must contain, and a notice that substantially fails to include them does not count as notice at all (§ 512(c)(3)(B)):

1. 1

   A signature

   Physical or electronic, by the copyright owner or someone authorized to act for them.

2. 2

   The photograph

   Identify the work. Attaching or linking your original removes any doubt about which photo you mean.

3. 3

   Where the copy is

   The exact page address, and the image file address if you have it, so the host can find it without searching.

4. 4

   How to reach you

   Name, postal address, telephone number and email.

5. 5

   Good faith

   A statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorized by you, your agent or the law, having considered fair use.

6. 6

   Accuracy, under oath

   A statement that the notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are the owner or authorized to act for the owner.

Our free notice drafter assembles these from your answers. Keep the language factual. Describe the photo and where it appears; leave out accusations and adjectives, which add nothing and can be quoted back at you.

Ask Google to drop it from image results too

Removing a photo from a website and removing it from Google are separate requests to separate companies. If the copy shows in Google Images, a removal request to Google can stop it appearing in results, even while the host is still deciding. It does not delete the page. The full route is on removing an image from Google search.

If nothing happens

Hosts work at their own pace and some never reply. After a reasonable interval, send a short follow-up quoting the original notice and its date. If the host still does nothing, the registrar is sometimes a further route, though registrars generally expect you to have tried the host first and many will only act on a court order. Using the registrar as a first step tends to slow things down rather than speed them up.

If the site owner files a counter-notice, the host may put the photo back after 10 to 14 business days unless you start a court action (§ 512(g)(2)(C)). At that point the question is no longer a takedown but a dispute, and it belongs with a lawyer.