Frequently Asked Questions

PhotoCheckWP uses Google's image search technology to check your uploads. To use it, you need a free Google Cloud account and an API key. Google gives you 1,000 free checks per month, enough for most newsrooms. Our Google Vision API guide walks you through getting your key step by step.

Yes. You create your own account and pay Google directly. PhotoCheckWP never touches your API usage or billing. The setup guide walks you through the whole process.

In your WordPress admin go to Settings > PhotoCheckWP and paste your Google Cloud Vision API key into the API Key field.

The first 1,000 image checks per month are free and reset every month. A typical newsroom uploading 600 images a month pays Google nothing. If you exceed 1,000 checks, it's $3.50 per 1,000 after that.

When the trial ends, PhotoCheckWP stops checking uploads. Your site keeps running but images are no longer verified before publish. To stay protected, purchase a license. You will see a persistent notice in your WordPress admin when the trial is close to expiring and after it ends.

Yes. PhotoCheckWP hooks into the WordPress media upload layer, which is the same regardless of which editor your team uses.

PhotoCheckWP is not a hard block. It requires acknowledgment and logs it permanently with the editor's name and a timestamp. What your staff does after that is an editorial decision. The log is your documentation that the check happened.

Every upload is recorded with the editor's name, the timestamp, the match count, and whether they acknowledged or removed the image. It lives in your WordPress database and is viewable under Settings > PhotoCheckWP > Log.

PhotoCheckWP fails open. If the API is unreachable or returns an error, the upload proceeds normally and the failure is logged. Your editors are never blocked by an API outage.

Possibly. PhotoCheckWP checks whether an image appears elsewhere on the web, not whether you have a license for it. A photo you licensed from Getty Images is likely indexed across thousands of sites, so it may return matches. That is expected behavior, not an error. The modal shows your editor where the image appears. If they licensed it legitimately, they acknowledge that and move on. The check takes seconds and the log records the decision. For images you shoot yourself and publish nowhere else first, matches are unlikely.

Email support@photocheckwp.com and we'll get back to you.