tphotobot
An automated crawler that checks whether photographs are being used without their owner’s permission.
What it does
tphotobot visits publicly accessible web pages and compares the images it finds against photographs supplied by our clients — photographers and businesses that own the copyright in them. When it finds a possible match, a person reviews it before anything further happens.
It reads pages and images. It does not attempt to log in, does not submit forms, does not follow links behind authentication, and does not collect personal data about people appearing in photographs. It keeps page metadata and compact mathematical fingerprints of images — not copies of your content.
How to identify it
Every request it makes carries this User-Agent:
tphotobot/0.1 (+http://crawler.estidraft.com/)
If you see traffic claiming to be tphotobot that you find abusive, please tell us. The name is not a credential — anyone can put it in a header, and we would want to know.
How to stop it
It reads and obeys robots.txt, including
Crawl-delay. To exclude it entirely, add this to your
robots.txt:
User-agent: tphotobot Disallow: /
The change takes effect the next time it reads your
robots.txt, within a day.
If you would rather not wait, or want it stopped immediately for any reason at all, email sledzbar@gmail.com. We will disable crawling for your domain and confirm it to you. You do not have to give a reason.
How politely it crawls
At most one request per second per site, and slower if your
robots.txt asks for it. It backs off on 429 and
503 responses and honours Retry-After. If it is
causing load on your site anyway, that is a bug on our side — write to
the address above and we will fix it.
Data we hold about your site
For pages we have visited: the URL, the time, the HTTP status code, and fingerprints of the images found. No page content, and no images beyond a short-lived working copy that is deleted within a day.
If you want that record removed, write to us at the address above.