AI & Image Rights Policy

Only upload images you may use

Before you upload, make sure you or your company may use the image for AI editing and for what you plan to do with the result — an online shop, social media, advertising, print.

Bought an image, or had it from a photographer or an agency? Read the licence. Many licences do not allow editing, do not allow AI use, or do not allow advertising.

"We have the file" is not the same as "we have the rights". Those are often two different agreements.

Models and other people

People have rights in their own image. In the Netherlands that is portretrecht, under the Copyright Act; elsewhere it has other names. Using someone's face or body in advertising almost always needs their permission.

• Use a model release that covers AI editing, the new images it produces, and how they will be used. A release written for one shoot usually does not cover generating new images of that person afterwards.
• Model Swap and Pose Swap change how a person looks or stands. Only do that when the person has agreed to it.
• Do not upload photographs of people who do not know about it, of children without their parents' permission, or of public figures.
• A photograph of an identifiable person is personal data. Your company needs a legal basis under the GDPR to use it, and must tell the person. Our Privacy Policy explains what SwapCat does with it.

Products, logos and designs

Product photographs, logos, prints and designs can be protected by copyright, trademarks or design rights.

• Use your own products and brand assets, or ones you are allowed to use.
• Do not use another brand's logo or design unless you are allowed to.
• Watch the background: a logo or an artwork that happens to be in frame is still someone's.

Photographers and editorial references

A reference image or a Campaign Template guides the style of a result. A photographer holds copyright in their photograph even when it is only used as a reference.

• Only use reference photographs you have permission to use, or the shared templates SwapCat provides.
• Do not try to reproduce one specific photograph, or a named photographer's work, closely.
• Style in general is not protected, but a recognisable copy of a particular image is a different matter.

What SwapCat guarantees about its shared templates

A shared Campaign Template that SwapCat publishes carries a recorded licence before it is published. SwapCat records, for every photograph in it, who holds the rights, that the licence covers commercial use by SwapCat's customers, that it covers use as an AI reference, that it covers the customers who may see it, and that it covers whatever derived use the template needs.

A template whose rights are not recorded and cleared is not published. You can see each shared template's source and permitted use in the application.

You may use a shared template inside SwapCat to make your own results. You may not extract, download or redistribute the template photographs themselves.

[To confirm: the editorial reference photographs in Nathan's own Art Direction Library are not published as shared templates until their rights have been established per photograph. Until then, shared templates come only from material SwapCat owns or has licensed in writing.]

AI makes mistakes: always check

AI changes things you did not ask it to. It alters product details, logos, text, colours, materials, fit, hands and faces, and it adds things that were never there. Check every image before you use or publish it:

• Is the product right: colour, shape, material, details, logo, text?
• Do the people look natural, and as you agreed with them?
• Is there anything odd or unwanted anywhere in the frame?

Marking an image Approved in SwapCat records your own check. SwapCat does not check results for you, and does not warrant that a result is usable.

Advertising and showing products honestly

Advertising may not mislead. If you sell a product using an AI image, the image must show the product as it really is. Do not use AI to give a product a feature, a quality or a result it does not have. In the Netherlands this is enforced under the rules on misleading advertising, and the Reclame Code Commissie also applies.

A garment's colour, its fabric, how it drapes and how it fits a body are exactly the things AI changes most readily, and exactly the things a customer complains about. They deserve the closest look.

Saying that an image was made with AI

The EU AI Act's transparency rules have applied since 2 August 2026. If you publish a realistic AI image or video of a real person, place or event — a deepfake, in the Act's terms — you must disclose that it was artificially generated or manipulated. The duty is lighter, but not absent, where the work is evidently artistic or creative.

That duty falls on you as the publisher, not on SwapCat.

Where the AI provider marks a generated image so that software can recognise it as AI-made, SwapCat passes that marking through: we never re-encode a result or strip its metadata. So the file you download keeps whatever provenance information it arrived with.

Platforms have their own rules too, and they are often stricter than the law. Check the ones you publish on.

Using AI images responsibly

Do not use SwapCat to make images that deceive, harass, sexualise, defame or discriminate against people, or that show a real person in a situation that never happened. Our Terms list what is not allowed, and we act on it.

Report a problem

Think an image in SwapCat is unlawful, infringes your rights, or shows you without your permission? Email SwapCat support, at the address on our Help page, with a description and, if you can, a link to the image. We look at every report, and we may remove content or suspend an account.