The Photograph You Forgot You Used
Somewhere in the archive of almost every blog that’s been running for more than a few years, there’s a photograph that belongs to someone else. Taken by a working photographer, pulled from a fashion magazine or a press kit, dropped into a post in 2011 or 2013 because that was just how things worked back then. You found an image, you used it, you moved on. The licensing conversation existed but hadn’t quite reached general practice yet—or you knew about it and decided it was probably fine.
Trunk Archive has decided it isn’t fine.
The American photo licensing agency has been pursuing European bloggers—primarily fashion and lifestyle sites—for using images by photographers including Ellen von Unwerth, Valerie Phillips, and Olivier Zahm without authorization. The demands run to several thousand euros per image. They reach back years. A post from 2010 is fully in scope. The statute of limitations is not working in your favor.
The mechanism is automated: Trunk Archive uses PicScout, a reverse image search tool that crawls the web continuously, flags matches, and hands the results to the legal team to process. It doesn’t distinguish between a major publication and a one-person blog that peaked in 2015. It identifies the image, generates an address, and the letter follows.
Technically, this applies to social media as well. A licensed image shared to Instagram or Twitter could trigger the same process. Whether they’re actively pursuing individual social posts at scale is another question, but the exposure is real either way.
The practical response is boring but necessary: check Trunk Archive’s roster of represented photographers—it’s long—against your own archive, and delete anything that matches. Before the letter arrives, not after. I went through my own archives twice after this broke. The second pass found something the first had missed. That’s what ten years of posting does—you forget what you’ve put up, and someone else keeps very careful track for you.