Etcht

What it does

You post a drawing. A week later it’s on someone else’s account with the credit gone, and you can’t prove the work started with you. Etcht is the fix for that: an invisible mark written into the pixels of an image, saying who made it. The marked copy looks identical to the original. Nothing is stamped over the art, and nothing is stored in metadata, because metadata is the first thing every platform strips.

Anyone can check an image. If it carries a mark, Etcht tells you who made it and, where people have opted in, where it has been: the platform it started on, where it was first seen, and where it has travelled since.

What it survives

The mark is built and measured against what actually happens to an image once it leaves your hands. Recompression, resizing and metadata stripping are the baseline. It covers the whole frame, so a crop still carries it, and it holds through a screenshot, a phone photo of a screen, and a generative model repainting the image.

Neo, the first release, is live, and the recognition benchmarks are public. The short version: re-encoded copies are recognised about 99% of the time, screenshots and crops about 95%, a photo of a screen about 90%, and a diffusion repaint about 85%. Across 7,000 unrelated images, none produced a false match. When a copy is too degraded to place reliably, Etcht says nothing rather than guessing.

It is not indestructible. No watermark is, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. The goal is that removing it costs more than it’s worth.

What it doesn’t do

Etcht does not crawl the web. Sightings only come from people who installed the browser extension and chose to take part, so the map of where an image has been is built by the people who wanted it built. Everything is hosted in the EU.

Images first. More content types are in the works.

Live at etcht.dev.