Photographers warn parents are using AI to strip watermarks from unpaid school photos

A school-photo preview is supposed to help parents decide whether to buy. Photographers told BBC Wales that some parents instead use AI to erase its watermark and keep the picture without paying. Their accounts describe lost income—and a privacy risk when photographs of children are uploaded to an AI service.

The shortcut starts with a preview

Ian Gilbert, founder of Emotion Picture Photography in Pontypool, said he heard parents discussing the practice at the school gates after he had taken photographs inside. One parent, he recalled, said they would pay £1 for AI to remove the watermark rather than buy his picture. Gilbert’s photos start at £9.

Gilbert said screenshot notifications showed that about 25% of the images he sent out were being captured, which he attributed to use in AI watermark-removal tools. That figure is his estimate, not an independently verified rate of AI editing or unpaid purchases. He described it as a quarter of parents not paying.

The financial consequences extend beyond the photographer, Gilbert said: schools receive a share of photo revenue. He reported falling profits over the previous 12 months and warned that continued losses could force him to stop offering the service. He also said lost sales put pressure on him to raise prices for paying families.

Somerset photographers Victoria Welton and Tessa Chapman described similar experiences to the BBC. Chapman said school photography could be the only professional portrait some lower-income families could afford. Yet low prices alone had not protected sports photographer Dylan Evans, who said people were removing watermarks from pictures he sold for £2.

Evans recalled sending an album to a football club after a booked game, then seeing one of his pictures on a player’s Instagram account hours later, without its watermark. He said he had not been paid. The altered images also worried him because poor-quality copies could still be traced back to his work.

Depending on the service, you may have very little idea how long that image is retained, how it is processed or whether it is reused.

Dr Simon Thorne, senior computer science lecturer at Cardiff School of Technologies, speaking to BBC Wales

An upload can reach beyond one family

Dr Simon Thorne, a senior computer science lecturer at Cardiff School of Technologies, urged people not to upload identifiable photographs. He warned that images could potentially leak, be used to train future models or be sold. Those were risks he identified, not findings that a particular service had misused these school photographs.

Group pictures introduce a further problem, Thorne said. Other parents may not know their children’s photographs have been uploaded, he said. The person seeking an edit is therefore not necessarily the only family affected by the decision to send the image to an AI system.

That concern is not limited to avoiding payment. Thorne described a case in which a parent used AI to add a child who had been ill back into a school group photograph. He understood the motivation but said the parent had not appreciated the privacy and safeguarding risks. He called for better education about uploading personal material.

Protecting the sale is the next challenge

Gilbert said a company he worked with was developing protective methods, including moving images over photographs to prevent copying. He also said the Guild of Photographers was exploring how to pursue prosecutions against people who used such services without paying. Those are proposed responses, not completed enforcement actions.

Matthew Sammon, a chartered trademark attorney at Sonder & Clay, said the photographer owns the copyright and that removing a protective watermark can constitute infringement. He said owners could seek an injunction against further use, damages for lost income and legal costs. But legal action is expensive, leaving photographers weighing enforcement against time spent doing their jobs.