Google Found a Way To Automatically and Perfectly Erase Watermarks on Stock Photos

If you ’re a professional photographer who assumed that slap an obtrusive water line across your work would protect it from being misuse online , Google ’s got some bad news for you . A squad of investigator from the ship’s company has encounter a way to automatically and perfectly rub out the watermarks used by popular Malcolm stock picture taking organizations .

Before thisresearchwas recently presented at the2017 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference , the easiest manner to remove a water line from an epitome was to either pay for the rights to use it , or go the slightly less easy itinerary and pass an hour in Photoshop painstakingly erase any overlaid graphic , which more often that not pay inadequate results .

Even the advanced automated cloning and erasing tools in the latest versions of Photoshop ca n’t completely erase a watermark without a lot of human assistance , but Google ’s new package can , as long as it ’s able to study a large batch of sample paradigm that have all been watermarked with the same logo or graphics .

It ’s much easier to remove a water line from a pic if you’re able to press out a copy of those overlaid computer graphic first . So what Google ’s software does is first scan thousands of sampling images from a given stock photo supplier , comparing each one until it notice a ingeminate pattern that inevitably reveals the watermark being used . Knowing what the water line looks like then allows the software to take it , leaving a clean photo that ’s almost unsufferable to secern from the original transcript .

The drawback to this approach is that it really only ferment on photograph source from a stock picture taking provider with a monumental catalog of watermarked sampling that can be examine , but more often than not it ’s those services that mass are trying to cheat .

Google did n’t write these findings as a style to serve the internet steal from gifted lensman , however . The fellowship rather lead this research one footstep further and found that by slightly warping a standard water line from look-alike to image , even the smallest of deformations made it impossible to automatically remove the water line without leaving obvious artifact behind . So by borrow this modified approaching , stock photography providers , and even professional photographers , can ensure that their imagery ca n’t easily be used without their license .

Argentina’s President Javier Milei (left) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., holding a chainsaw in a photo posted to Kennedy’s X account on May 27. 2025.