Google technology deletes watermark photos

Google Developers have developed an algorithm that can automatically and widely remove watermarks from stockphotos.

A watermark often consists of many different objects, such as lines and dots, to make removal as difficult as possible. In practice, it is effective because manually removing a watermark even for professionals is a pretty time consuming job. But it becomes problematic if the same watermark is used on all photos of a particular photographer or a photo agency. Then it only has to be 'cracked' to be able to be removed on a large scale from all the photos. And that's exactly what Google has shown with the algorithm.

Defending yourself against the algorithm is quite simple, says Google. By changing a watermark on each photo a little bit of shape, it becomes impossible for the algorithm to remove the watermarks without leaving visible residues.

The developers have shared their findings in a report. The report is free to download.