For publishers & institutions
Prove you checked.
Editorial teams, research integrity offices, and newsrooms rarely need to check one image. They need to screen a whole submission, understand what it can and cannot prove, and keep a record that holds up when someone asks six months later.
The workflow
Four steps, all of them free, none of them requiring an account or an upload.
Drop the whole submission in
Every figure, photograph, and supplementary image at once. Nothing uploads — the files are read on the machine they are already sitting on, which matters when the material is under embargo or unpublished.
Batch auditRead the table, not the files
Each file gets a provenance status, a signer where one exists, a declared origin, and a hash. Across the set you get the proportion carrying verifiable provenance, retaining metadata, and declaring AI involvement — plus any files that are byte-for-byte identical to each other.
See the outputFollow anything that looks odd
Open a single file for its full signal matrix and edit history, or put two revisions side by side to see precisely what changed between them and what the likely cause was.
Compare revisionsKeep something defensible
Export a timestamped report where every row carries its SHA-256. Months later it can be matched against the original files by someone else entirely — and it demonstrates that a check was performed, which assertion alone never does.
Audit reportQuestions it can answer
Each of these resolves to observable evidence rather than an inference.
- Was this figure made in an image editor?
- Software and creator-tool metadata name the application and version where they survive, and a C2PA manifest records the actual sequence of edits.
- Has this image changed since revision 1?
- The hash answers it definitively. If it changed, the comparison shows which signals were lost and what kind of processing most likely caused it.
- Did the author declare AI involvement?
- Where a manifest carries an IPTC digital source type, it is surfaced verbatim — including the distinction between fully generated, composite, and merely enhanced.
- Are any of these files the same image twice?
- Exact duplicates are flagged across the whole submission by comparing hashes, which catches recycled and re-submitted figures.
- Is this credential genuine and unbroken?
- Signature validation is cryptographic. A valid result means the bytes are unchanged since signing; a failed one means they are not.
- Is our own pipeline destroying provenance?
- The pipeline audit takes the same asset at each stage of your workflow and names the step where credentials stop surviving. Most systems resize on upload, and resizing destroys everything attached upstream.
What this is not
If your primary concern is figure manipulation — spliced blots, duplicated panels, adjusted gels — this is not the tool for it, and we would rather say so now than after you have trusted it.
Not image forensics
We do not analyse pixels for splicing, cloning, or duplicated regions within an image. That is a separate discipline served by dedicated products, and it works on the image content rather than its provenance record. Exact-duplicate detection here compares hashes, which catches identical files and nothing subtler.
Not an AI detector
Nothing here estimates whether an image or a manuscript was AI-generated. Where a producer has declared AI involvement in a signed manifest we report that declaration; where no declaration exists, we say so rather than guessing. No percentage is ever produced.
Not proof a scene is real
A valid credential attests to a file's record — who signed it, and that the bytes are unchanged since. A carefully staged photograph signed by a real camera validates perfectly. Judging what an image depicts remains editorial work.
Not a reason to reject a submission
Most files carry no credentials, because ordinary handling destroys them. Treating absence as suspicion would flag almost every honest author you have. Our measurements show a valid credential surviving one of five routine operations.
Why now
Article 50 of the EU AI Act became enforceable on 2 August 2026, and the machine-readable marking requirement follows on 2 December for systems already on the market. Providers have begun marking output, which means submissions arriving now increasingly carry declarations worth reading — and increasingly arrive stripped of them by the platforms in between.
The practical consequence for an editorial process is not that you can now detect AI. It is that provenance has become a thing you can be asked about, and “we looked” is a much weaker answer than a hashed report with a date on it.
There is a good deal of tooling being described in this space at the moment, some of it promising things we do not believe can be built. We have written up what a verification tool can actually observe — what is readable today, what we would like to add, and where the limits sit — as background reading rather than as compliance guidance.
Everything described here is free and runs in your browser. Saved history, shared cases, vendor records across repeat contributors, and an API are the parts that need servers, and those are what paid plans will cover.