Getty Images Filed for Bankruptcy. Here's How to Tell If a Photo Online Is Real.

What happened to Getty Images?

On October 21, 2026, Getty Images filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware (Reuters, CNBC). It's a restructuring, not a shutdown. Getty says it will keep operating as usual, with no impact on the photographers who contribute to it, its customers or its employees, and expects to finish by the end of the year. Afterward, affiliates of the Getty family and Koch Equity Development will own the whole company.

The main problems were financial. Getty carried more than $1 billion of debt (Law360), and its planned merger with rival Shutterstock, announced in January 2025, was called off in July 2026 (Tech Startups, citing Getty's filings).

Then there's AI. Reuters describes Getty as dealing with "heavy debt and growing competition from AI-generated imagery." Getty's own announcement doesn't blame AI. So the fair way to put it is that AI is one pressure among several, not the reason Getty is in court. But it's a pressure every photo business now feels.

Why this matters even if you've never bought a stock photo

AI image tools now make pictures at a scale no photo agency ever did. At its May 2026 developer conference, Google said its Nano Banana image models had generated more than 50 billion images (Glitchwire). Adobe reported more than 24 billion images and other assets made with its Firefly AI by June 2025 (AppleInsider). Even Getty sells AI images: it launched its own generator in 2023, trained on its licensed library (Decrypt).

Most of those images are harmless: illustrations, ads, art, a funny picture for a group chat. The trouble starts when an AI image is passed off as a real photo:

• A dating profile built on a face that doesn't exist (dating apps)
• A marketplace listing with a "product photo" of an item nobody photographed (fake marketplace photos)
• A dramatic "news" photo shared thousands of times before anyone checks (is this news photo real?)
• A job applicant or recruiter with an AI-generated headshot (AI headshots on LinkedIn)

The usual trick for spotting a stolen photo doesn't help here. Reverse image search finds where else a picture has appeared, but a freshly generated AI image has never been posted anywhere before, so there's nothing to find (reverse image search vs. AI detection).

How to tell if a photo is real: 6 quick checks

1. Look at the small details. Hands, teeth, ears, earrings and glasses are where AI still slips: an extra finger, a tooth that blends into the next, an earring that doesn't match. Newer models get these right more often, so a clean result doesn't prove a photo is real.
2. Read any text in the picture. Street signs, shop names, labels and name tags. Garbled or melted lettering is one of the strongest giveaways.
3. Check the light. Do the shadows fall the same way as the light on the person's face? Do reflections in windows and eyes match the scene?
4. Look behind the subject. Warped door frames, railings that bend, objects that melt into each other, or a crowd of near-identical faces.
5. Look for Content Credentials. Some cameras and editing apps attach a record of how an image was made and changed (what Content Credentials are). If it's there, it tells you a lot. If it's missing, that doesn't mean the image is fake: most images online don't carry it yet.
6. Run it through a detector. As AI images get more convincing, the eye test gets less reliable. A detector looks for patterns in the image itself that people can't see (how AI image detection works).

For a longer walk-through with examples, see how to tell if a photo is AI-generated.

Check any image in a couple of seconds

Faux Spy is a free browser extension for Chrome, Firefox and Edge. Right-click any image and choose Investigate this image, or hover over it and click Investigate. A few seconds later you get a verdict (AI-generated, real photo, digital art or inconclusive) with a confidence score, so a strong 94% result reads differently from a borderline 54% one. You get 3 free checks a day, with no account.

No extension? You can check an image on the web instead.

If you check a lot of images, Pro gives you 200 checks a month, Deep Dive mode for every image on a page, and a history of what you've checked. It starts with a 7-day free trial.

One honest caveat: no detector is perfect. Treat the result as one strong signal, alongside where the image came from and who's sharing it.