Photos and Video of You

The answer here is better than you expect

Most of this site is about things that do not come down. This one is the exception.

If someone has shared an intimate photo or video of you without your consent, you are in the one category on this site where the rules are written down, the routes are free, and a deadline is set by federal law. Nude photographs, sexual video, images taken in private, and fake nudes made of you by software all sit inside published policies. You do not have to explain how the image came to exist or know who shared it. The rules turn on the content and on your consent, not on your conduct — and embarrassment is the biggest reason these routes go unused.

The honesty this page owes you sits at the other end of the same subject. An ordinary photograph — unflattering, posted by someone who had every right to take it — has no route at all. No policy covers it and no fee changes that. Which half you are in decides everything that follows.

Before any of it, the list of addresses

Every route here asks for the same thing first, and almost nobody arrives with it: exact page addresses, one for each place the image sits. “Search my name and you will see it” is not something anyone can act on.

So the first job is unglamorous list-making. Search by picture rather than by words: a search engine lets you upload an image, drag one into the search box, or paste an image address, and it returns pages carrying that image or one like it. Google's own guidance for people dealing with intimate imagery recommends exactly this — tracking where images appear before requesting anything.

Two cautions. No operator claims its image search finds every copy, so treat your list as the copies you found rather than all of them. And save each page today, dated, with the address visible, because pages get edited and deleted.

The federal law, and the only hard deadline in this subject

The TAKE IT DOWN Act was signed on May 19, 2025, and the Federal Trade Commission described enforcement as beginning in May 2026. It turned this from something a private person requests into something a covered platform is obliged to do. On a valid request, in the FTC's own words, a covered platform

“must remove the content—along with any known identical copies—within 48 hours”
— Federal Trade Commission, “Take It Down Act enforcement starts now: What to know about the FTC and TIDA,” May 19, 2026, read August 15, 2026

Three parts matter. Forty-eight hours is a real, published, statutory number, and there is almost nothing else like it in this subject. Known identical copies are named in the obligation, so it is not limited to the one address you report. And the FTC describes covered platforms broadly — social media, messaging, and image or video sharing apps and websites.

What counts is wider than people assume. The FTC describes the content as nonconsensual intimate imagery including real photos and videos as well as “digital forgeries” — images of people digitally created or altered. A fake nude made with an app is inside the law, not outside it.

There is a route for when a report goes nowhere: platforms that fail to comply may face FTC law enforcement action, including civil penalties the agency puts at $53,088 per violation, and a non-compliant platform can be reported at TakeItDown.ftc.gov.

Whether a particular site is a covered platform, and whether a request meets the statute, are legal questions and I am not an attorney. Use the platform's own reporting form, which will have been built to the statute's requirements.

Stopping it being posted again

Reporting a copy deals with a copy. It does nothing about the same file being uploaded somewhere else next week, which is the fear that keeps people awake. Two free services exist for that, and neither asks you to send the image. Software on your device turns the picture into a hash — a fingerprint that identifies the file without containing it. The fingerprint is sent; the image stays with you.

For anyone 18 or over in the image, it is StopNCII.org, described in its FAQ as “a tool developed by Meta and non-profit charity, SWGfL.”

“A hash will be sent from your device, but not the image/video itself. Your content will not be shared, it will remain on your device.”

“StopNCII.org cannot remove images from the whole internet, only the participating platforms listed on our partners page.”
— StopNCII.org, read August 15, 2026

Participating platforms match against the fingerprint over time. A hash is created immediately, updates may take three to five days, and the FAQ states that manipulated deepfakes count. One published limit: a hashed image later cropped, filtered or clipped may not be recognized.

For anyone under 18 when the image was taken, it is Take It Down, run by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which says you can still use it as an adult today. Same mechanic, and honest about its limits:

“This will not prevent the content from being uploaded on other sites”
— National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Take It Down FAQ, read August 15, 2026

Neither reaches encrypted messaging. And a sequencing note from StopNCII itself: if images are already online, report them to the platforms first, then add them here. The fingerprint stops the next upload, not the current one.

What a search engine will take out of results

This is separate from everything above and constantly confused with it. A search engine removes results; only the site owner removes pages, so even a successful removal leaves the image where it is. Inside that limit the published policies are unusually good. The personal sexual content policy covers three situations, and the third surprises people:

• Real imagery of you nude, in a sexual act or in an intimate state, including imagery shared without your consent.
• Fabricated content — deepfakes, fake nude photographs, AI-generated sexual imagery distributed without consent.
• Misassociation — where your name, alias or handle is attached to pornographic sites or ads that have nothing to do with you. No image need exist for this one.

A separate route covers images of a person under 18, and its conditions catch people out: image addresses only, the request must come from the person depicted or their representative, and the image must not come from a social account or page the requester manages. That last one is the common trip — if it is your own post, delete it at source.

Two things to expect. The outcome may be partial: the address stops appearing for searches of your name while still appearing for other queries. And no decision timeframe is published for any of them — not a target, not a median, not a maximum. Any number of days quoted to you for a search engine decision was not published by the search engine.

The photograph you did not take is not yours to take down

Copyright is the most oversold tool in this market, and the misunderstanding is one sentence long: you can only file a copyright takedown if you own the copyright. The US Copyright Office states it plainly in Circular 1 — copyright in a work initially belongs to the author who created it, and for a photograph that is the person who pressed the button.

• A selfie you took: yours. The route is available.
• A photo somebody else took of you: theirs. The route is not available to you, even though you are the person in it, and even if it is intimate.
• A photo taken by a professional or an employer: the copyright may sit with the studio or employer.

That is why the other routes on this page exist at all: a system built on ownership cannot help the person being harmed when they do not own the picture.

You do not have to register anything to own a copyright, and the Copyright Office runs a free public directory of the agents notices are sent to.

Two cautions. The person hosting the content can file a counter-notice, after which the material may be restored; I will not quote a number of days for that window, because I could not verify it. And knowingly claiming material infringes when it does not carries legal exposure — attorney territory, and I am not an attorney. Some vendors file these notices on photographs their client did not take, because a small host sometimes complies. One question settles it: whose copyright is this, and can it be proved?

The ordinary photo, which has no route at all

Now the other half. A picture that is merely unwelcome — a bad moment, a party a decade ago, a photograph a former friend has every right to own — falls outside all of it. The published answer for that photo is the site owner.

“Most images that show up in Google search results are from websites that aren't owned by Google, so we are unable to remove these images from the web.”
— Google Search Help, “Remove an image from Google,” read August 15, 2026

Every route on that page ends at somebody else: contact the owner, remove it on the platform where it sits, use your own site's controls if the site is yours, or — after the source has changed — ask for a stale result to be refreshed. That last one only does something once somebody else has done the hard part, and the operator's own word for how long it then takes is “eventually.”

There is a smaller ask here that almost nobody makes. A search engine understands a picture largely from the page around it — caption, alt text, nearby words — so a photograph surfaces for your name mostly because the page says your name. “Take my name out of the caption, the alt text and the headline” is a far smaller request than “delete the page,” and it targets exactly what makes the image findable by name.

Who decides, and everything anyone publishes about how long

Nobody here works for you, and none is reachable by paying more:

The published timings fit in one paragraph, which tells you something. Forty-eight hours for a covered platform, under federal law. Three to five days for updates on the hashing service. “Eventually,” for an image result to refresh after the source changes. That is the complete list — every search engine decision on this page has no published timeframe at all.

What working with someone on this actually involves

Most of what is on this page you can do yourself, for nothing, and I would rather say so than let you find out later. The reporting forms, the hashing services and the FTC complaint route are all free.

Where help is worth having is the part that is tedious or unbearable: building the address list without looking at the images over and over, filing the same report accurately in several places, keeping a dated record, and knowing which route fits before a week goes into the wrong one.

What I will not do is tell you an image will be gone. Platforms decide, search engines decide, and copies sit on services nobody has surveyed. What I will say is that this is the strongest ground on this site: if you have put off filing because you assumed nothing could be done, that is wrong here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Published 2026-08-15