Provyn

Don't be fooled by misinformation. Hover any picture: who made it, when, whether AI is on record. Libraries of 500M+ pictures.

Provyn is the premier image provenance tool. Every picture you see online came from somewhere. Provyn shows you what can actually be known about where and when, without leaving the page. Hover any image and a small badge appears in the corner. Hover the badge and a panel opens. No right-click, no copying addresses into other sites. HISTORY ON THE INTERNET Provyn asks the Internet Archive how long that image address has been on the web and shows the earliest copy it holds. A picture shared as breaking news that the archive has held since 2019 tells you something. It dates that address on that site, not the picture itself. A button opens a tab to show where it was first detected on the internet. IS IT A KNOWN PHOTOGRAPH? Provyn checks every picture you hover against stored public photo archives: over 250,000 photographs from Wikimedia Commons and a Library of Congress collection. It also asks Wikimedia Commons whether it holds the exact same file. When it finds one, you get the photographer, the licence, when the photo was taken, and a link to the original. A news photo presented as today's that turns out to be a 1943 Library of Congress photograph has answered its own question. When it finds nothing, it says so. IS IT A STOCK PHOTO? Press Run Stock Check and Provyn searches multiple stock photo agencies - Flickr, Pexels, Pixabay and Shutterstock. Between them those libraries hold over 500 million pictures. Provyn compares every result with the picture and reports only one that is the same photograph, giving the photographer or contributor, the date and a link. DOES IT CARRY A SIGNED RECORD? Some images carry a signed record inside the file, an open standard called C2PA, used by Google, Adobe, OpenAI, some camera makers and some news agencies. Provyn reads it in your browser and tells you who signed it, whether the signature holds up, and whether the record says AI made or edited the image. What the panel can say: Made by AI. The record says AI generated the image, and names the tool where it can. AI was used to edit this. A photograph with generative editing on top. Image taken by camera. The record says a camera captured it. This describes the capture, not what was in front of the lens: someone can photograph an AI image on a screen. The wording never says "not AI". Created by [name]. A valid record that names a signer but not how the image was made. Common and usually innocent. Unreliable metadata. The signature doesn't hold up, or the picture no longer matches its record. The second usually means a website re-saved the image. No metadata. No record at all. This is what most images show while C2PA progressively adopted. WHAT IT WILL NOT DO It will not tell you an image is real or fake. It is not a deepfake detector and it never guesses from what a picture looks like. Most images have no signed record: social networks and news sites strip it when they re-save uploads. "No metadata" is the normal case, not a warning. A signature that checks out proves the record hasn't been altered since it was signed. It does not prove the name on it is genuine, because the certificate isn't checked against the official C2PA trust list. The panel says this in words rather than showing a green check. An archive or stock match is a strong lead, not proof of who made a picture. Cropped, mirrored or heavily edited copies can be missed. PRIVACY No account, no sign-in, no tracking, no analytics, no advertising. When you hover a picture, Provyn sends a fingerprint of it, never the picture or its address, to the Provyn server to check the archives, and a different fingerprint to Wikimedia Commons. It sends the image's address to the Internet Archive; you can switch that off. Only when you press Run Stock Check does Provyn send a few words from beside the picture and a small copy of the picture, with its hidden information removed, to the Provyn server, which searches Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, Pexels, Pixabay and Shutterstock. The copy is not kept. The full privacy policy explains exactly what is sent and kept. WHY IT ASKS TO RUN ON ALL SITES It can't know in advance which page you'll want to check. It reads an image only when you hover it, and reads image files, not the rest of the page. SETTINGS Choose where Provyn runs: everywhere except sites you block, only on sites you choose, or nowhere. Set the minimum image size, the badge corner, whether a key must be held before badges appear, whether content credentials are read on hover, and whether the Internet Archive lookup runs. WHO THIS IS FOR Journalists and editors checking a picture before using it. Researchers, moderators and fact-checkers. Anyone who has seen an image and wondered where it really came from, and would rather have a straight answer, including "nobody knows", than a confident guess.