Here's what each term means, and why it matters to you.
Notes attached to an image file that describe the image, rather than being part of the picture.
Your camera or phone writes these automatically: which camera and lens, the shutter speed, the date and time, the editing software you used, and — on most phones — the exact GPS coordinates where you were standing. All of it travels with the file when you send it to someone.
Deleting those attached notes so the file arrives with nothing but the picture.
The image itself is unchanged — same pixels, same quality. What's gone is the record of where and how it was made. The trade-off is that any copyright information you'd embedded goes too, unless you use a preset that keeps it.
Text laid over the top of your image, the way a stock photo site marks a preview.
ScribShield tiles it diagonally across the picture. It's the bluntest form of protection: obvious, hard to remove cleanly, and it changes how your work looks. Good for previews and social posts; usually wrong for final delivery to a client.
A signature hidden inside the pixels themselves, which nobody can see but which can be read back later.
Digital images store each pixel as numbers. Nudging the least significant of those numbers by one changes the colour by an amount no eye can detect — but the pattern of those nudges can carry a message. That's what "LSB" means: least significant bit. The practice of hiding a message inside another file is called steganography.
Practical upshot: if someone reposts your work as theirs, the signature is still sitting in their copy, and you can point at it.
A faint pattern layered over your image, intended to confuse AI models that train on it.
AI image models learn from statistical regularities in pictures. Adding a carefully structured layer of interference muddies those regularities, so the image is a worse teaching example than it looks. To a human viewer it's barely noticeable.
It's a deterrent rather than a lock. Treat it as making your work less attractive to scrape, not as making it impossible.
A stronger version of the same idea, aimed at what a model learns rather than at how the image looks.
Protective noise is a blanket of interference. A poison layer is targeted: it changes specific things models rely on, so a model training on your picture draws the wrong conclusions from it. Both are invisible to people. Poisoning is the more effective of the two, and the one that has to keep changing as models do. It's a Premium feature in the extension.
Software walking through websites and copying images in bulk, automatically.
This is how most AI training sets were assembled: not by asking, but by downloading everything reachable. If your work is on a public page, assume it has been scraped at least once.
The work happens on your own computer, not on somebody's server.
When ScribShield protects an image, the file goes from your hard drive, through your browser, to the site you're uploading to. It never passes through Scribbiter. There's no copy of your work on our side, because there's no server involved to hold one.
Catching a file at the moment you upload it, and swapping in the protected version.
It's what lets you keep your normal habits. You press the site's own upload button; ScribShield steps in between your click and the site receiving the file, then lets the upload continue to its original destination.
The unprocessed file a dedicated camera writes, before it becomes a JPEG.
RAW files carry the richest metadata of anything you'll handle — including precise timestamps and, on connected cameras, location.
Turning a drawing described by shapes and lines into a grid of pixels.
SVG files are instructions rather than pixels, so pixel-based protections have nothing to attach to. Converting to a normal image first makes watermarking and noise possible — at the cost of the file no longer scaling infinitely.
A saved combination of protections, so you don't have to decide each setting every time.
ScribShield ships four — Privacy, Ownership, Anti-AI and Maximum —. If none of them suits, leave the preset unchecked and set the individual switches yourself.