Is it legal to remove a Getty preview watermark?

The license text I retrieved contains no clause about removing marks, so on the license itself: the edit is not addressed. What the clause addresses is use - comp use is test/sample for up to 30 days, never final or public. The broader legal question (copyright, CMI rules) does not depend on the tool and is quoted on Is Removing a Watermark Illegal?

Does removing the watermark make the image licensed?

No. Licensing happens when you purchase it. The comp clause is explicit: "unless a license is purchased, content cannot be used in any final materials or any publicly available materials."

How long can I use a Getty comp?

"Up to 30 days following download", for test or sample use only. Adobe's comp window is 90 days; Getty's is 30.

Can I use a cleaned comp in a client mockup?

If that means showing it internally, to a client, as a preview of a layout - that is test/sample use within the 30 days, which the clause permits. If the mockup ships, prints or goes live, it has become a final or public material, and the clause forbids that regardless of the mark.

Do Getty's terms ban watermark removal?

Not in the text I retrieved - the word "watermark" appears zero times in it. What the text does contain is quoted on this page: the use definition covering modify/edit, the comp clause, monitoring, termination, and an indemnity carve-out for modifications you make.

Will removing the watermark give me full quality?

No. The comp file's detail is the ceiling. On this site the fill only propagates pixels the file already contains; nothing is invented and nothing is recovered.

Does this site keep or upload my image?

No, and it is checkable: no fetch, XMLHttpRequest, WebSocket or sendBeacon anywhere in the tool's JavaScript, and no storage writes. The verification steps are on the upload-test page .

Can you remove a Getty watermark in Photoshop?

The pixels come off the same way they do here - a propagation fill or any editor paints over the mark. What does not change is the license: a cleaned comp is still a comp, and the 30-day test/sample window and the final/public-use bar still apply. The mark was never what made the file usable.

Is removing a Getty watermark illegal?

On the license text I retrieved, no - the word "watermark" appears zero times, so there is no contractual removal ban in that document. The separate copyright / CMI question (DMCA §1202 and its equivalents) does not depend on the tool and is quoted on Is Removing a Watermark Illegal? .

Does Getty know if you remove the watermark?

The agreement I retrieved reserves the right to "monitor downloads and user activity" and to suspend access on breach - a contract monitoring right, not a claim about detecting edited pixels. This page makes no claim about Getty's technical detection ability, only about what the text says.

Can You Remove a Getty Preview Watermark? What Getty's Own License Says

You can strip the pixels off a Getty preview, and it changes nothing you actually care about: the license, not the watermark, decides what you may do with the image. Those are two separate questions, and Getty's own Content License Agreement answers both - without using the word "watermark" even once.

The agreement (retrieved from gettyimages.com/license-info, marked "LAST UPDATED: April 2026") calls the preview file a comp and says, verbatim: "You are welcome to use content from the Getty Images site on a complimentary basis for test or sample (composite or comp) use only, for up to 30 days following download. However, unless a license is purchased, content cannot be used in any final materials or any publicly available materials. No other rights or warranties are granted for comp use."

Read that as two halves. The permission covers test or sample use for 30 days - and editing is part of "use" under the agreement's own definition. The restriction covers what the file can never become: a final material or a public one. Removing the mark does not move the file across that line. It removes the only thing on your screen that reminded you the line was there.

Below: the comp clause quoted in full, the zero-count finding on "watermark", the edit/use distinction that decides the question, Getty's actual enforcement text, and what a cleaned comp still is not.

Before and after: a tiled preview watermark removed in the browser — A real run on watermarkstrip.com — a tiled preview watermark (left) is painted over and removed (right). Removing the mark does not change the license; see the page.

What Getty's license says about comp use, quoted in full

Everything quoted on this page comes from one retrievable source: Getty Images' Content License Agreement, published at gettyimages.com/license-info, marked "LAST UPDATED: April 2026". I retrieved the full text on September 23, 2026, and every quote below is word for word from it. The agreement opens by naming itself:

"This is a license agreement between you and Getty Images that explains how you can use photos, illustrations, vectors, and video clips (individually and collectively, 'content') that you license from Getty Images. By downloading content from Getty Images, you accept the terms of this agreement."

Inside the license-models section, it defines the file this question is about:

"Comp license: You are welcome to use content from the Getty Images site on a complimentary basis for test or sample (composite or comp) use only, for up to 30 days following download. However, unless a license is purchased, content cannot be used in any final materials or any publicly available materials. No other rights or warranties are granted for comp use."

Three sentences. A permission (test or sample use, up to 30 days), a prohibition (final materials, publicly available materials), and a warranty disclaimer. That is the entire contract around the file you downloaded. There is no other clause about comps or previews anywhere else in the document.

The word "watermark" appears zero times in the agreement

This is an observation about a text I actually retrieved, and you can repeat it: pull the full text of gettyimages.com/license-info and search it. Case-insensitive:

"watermark": 0 occurrences. Not in the comp clause, not anywhere.
"preview": 0 occurrences. The file Getty discusses is called a comp, never a preview.
"comp": 3 occurrences - all three inside the single Comp license clause quoted above: the bold label itself, "composite or comp" in the parenthetical, and "comp use" in the last sentence.
"complimentary": 1 occurrence - the same clause.

So this contract contains no "do not remove the watermark" sentence, no anti-circumvention clause, no clause that makes the act of stripping the mark itself a breach. There is nothing to quote, because Getty did not write one - not in this document, as of the text I retrieved.

Inference, labelled as such: the omission looks deliberate rather than accidental. A clause banning mark removal would add little - the edit cannot get anyone anything (see the file-level argument below) - and the final/public-use prohibition already covers every case that matters to Getty. That is my reading, not a Getty statement.

If you came from the Adobe Stock version of this question, the contrast is real but narrow: Adobe's terms do not ban removal either, but Adobe at least names the comp file "a watermarked Work". Getty's text never goes that far - the mark is simply never mentioned. Both pages agree on the substance: the contract regulates use, not edits. The Adobe page, with its terms quoted, is here.

Editing is a 'use': the definition that decides this question

Getty's agreement defines its key term, verbatim:

"For purposes of this agreement, 'use' means to copy, reproduce, modify, edit, synchronize, perform, display, broadcast, publish, or otherwise make use of. Please make sure you read the Restricted Uses section below for exceptions."

Modify and edit sit inside "use". That matters more than it looks. The comp clause's permission - "test or sample (composite or comp) use" - is a permission to use, and editing is a use. So retouching the comp, which includes removing the mark, is an activity the agreement already addresses: it is permitted exactly to the extent the underlying use is test or sample use within the 30 days. The prohibition half is written against uses too - "final materials" and "publicly available materials" are categories describing what you do with the result, not what you did to the file.

The practical matrix that falls straight out of the text:

Strip the mark, use the image in an internal mockup within 30 days. Test or sample use. Covered by the permission.
Strip the mark, publish the image anywhere. A final or public material. Forbidden by the clause, regardless of the mark being gone.
Keep the mark, publish anyway. Equally forbidden. The watermark was never the thing making publication a breach - which is why removing it cannot make publication permitted.
License the image, then edit freely. Once licensed, you use the content under the paid grant - the agreement's own framing is "You may use licensed content in any way consistent with the rights granted below and not restricted" - and the comp clause stops being the section that governs you.

The watermark's presence or absence does not appear anywhere in that matrix. It never does.

What Getty's enforcement text actually says

No removal ban - but the agreement is not toothless, and the teeth it does have are quoted here rather than paraphrased.

Monitoring. Verbatim: "Getty Images reserves the right to monitor downloads and user activity to ensure compliance with the terms of this agreement. If Getty Images determines that you are in breach of this or any other term of this agreement, it may suspend access to your account and seek further legal remedies."

Termination on breach. Verbatim: "Getty Images may terminate this agreement at any time if you breach any of the terms of this or any other agreement with Getty Images, in which case you must immediately: cease using the content; delete or destroy any copies; and, if requested, confirm to Getty Images in writing that you have complied with these requirements."

The indemnity carve-out almost nobody mentions. In Section 10, Getty promises to defend and indemnify you against damages arising from its own breach of the warranties in Section 9 - the protection that matters when licensed content turns out to infringe someone's right. That protection carries an exclusion, verbatim: "This indemnification does not apply to the extent any damages, costs or losses arise out of or are a result of modifications made by you to the content or the context in which the content is used by you."

My reading, labelled as such: a cleaned comp is a modified file, deployed in a context of your choosing. If that combination lands you in an infringement dispute, this sentence says Getty's duty to defend does not reach damages flowing from your modifications or your context. Removing the mark is about the most literal "modifications made by you to the content" the document could name. I am not asserting Getty would invoke it in any particular case - I am saying the sentence is in the agreement, and it is about modifications.

Why the cleaned file is still just the preview

Set the contract aside; this part is about files. A comp is a derivative render Getty serves for evaluation. The licensed original is a different file, produced from the full-quality source. Whatever sits under the watermark in your comp, the comp does not contain the original's detail.

On this site the fill makes that ceiling concrete. The removal is propagation-based (Telea's Fast-Marching Method, implemented in the page): masked pixels are filled by weighted averages of pixels already present around the mark, with the weights set by how well each neighbour's gradient points into the hole. Every pixel in the result comes from your file. Not one pixel is invented, and not one pixel of the original's lost detail is recovered. A clean-looking result is the preview, cleaned - a plausible interpolation of what the preview already held.

That is also why the contract does not need a removal ban: the edit cannot get anyone anything. If you need the full image, the licensed download is the only thing that has it. The fuller argument - why "does the tool invent pixels?" should be the first question you ask of any remover - is on Generative vs Propagation Watermark Removal.

What to do instead, in order

Already licensed it? Stop working on the comp. Download the licensed file from your account. It is the file you paid for, at full quality, and it needs no cleaning.
Not licensed yet? Keep the mark while it is a preview. The comp clause gives you 30 days of complimentary test/sample use from download. A layout mockup with the Getty mark on it is honest about its own status, and the clause covers it.
Need a clean internal comp inside the 30 days? Do the edit somewhere that neither uploads nor retains the file. On this site the removal runs entirely in your browser: the tool's JavaScript contains no fetch, no XMLHttpRequest, no WebSocket, no sendBeacon, and no storage writes - no localStorage, sessionStorage, indexedDB or cookies. To verify any tool yourself: the 60-second upload test.
Decide inside 30 days, not eventually. The clock here is shorter than Adobe's 90-day comp window. And the termination clause quoted above ends your rights immediately on breach, with destruction of copies required.
No license at all, image not yours? Do not strip anything. That is a copyright question, not a comp question, and it does not depend on which tool you use. The statutes, quoted: Is Removing a Watermark Illegal?

How this tool behaves on a Getty comp, stated before you start

You paint the mask yourself. No automatic watermark detection. Brush range 4-120 px, default 24.
Fill is propagation only. Telea's Fast-Marching Method in the page; nothing invented, nothing recovered. Same input and mask, same output - the code contains no Math.random, no Date.now, no performance.now.
Full-resolution load. Images load at natural size; above 40 megapixels the tool shows a warning verbatim: "Image is very large; processing may be slow or limited by browser memory." On a comp, the honest limit is the comp's own detail, not the megapixels.
Input: PNG, JPG, JPEG, WebP, BMP, GIF (first frame). Output: PNG or JPEG, exported locally as watermark-removed.png / .jpg.
Nothing leaves, nothing stays. No network calls and no storage writes anywhere in the code; when the tab closes, the work is gone.

What I could not verify, stated plainly

Getty's FAQ answers. gettyimages.com/faq renders its answers in collapsed panels I could not retrieve. Anything Getty says there about comp watermarks is not quoted on this page.
How the mark is technically applied. The agreement text says nothing about the watermark overlay itself - nothing about opacity, placement, or whether it moves. I found no Getty document describing it, so this page makes no claim about it.
Whether Getty treats removal as an independent violation. No clause in the retrieved text does. That is a statement about one document on one date - not about Getty's enforcement practice, its website terms, or any other agreement (enterprise, API, embedded viewer) that I did not retrieve.
No numbers on this page. No search volumes, no prices, no rankings, no claim about how often any of this happens. A number I cannot trace to a source does not go on the page.
Not legal advice. If your situation has money or liability attached, read the license yourself or ask a lawyer in your jurisdiction.

Where the claims on this page come from

Getty Images Content License Agreement, retrieved September 23, 2026 from gettyimages.com/license-info (the page is marked "LAST UPDATED: April 2026"). All quotes are verbatim; nothing inside quotation marks is paraphrased.
The occurrence counts ("watermark" 0, "preview" 0, "comp" 3, "complimentary" 1) are case-insensitive full-text searches over the text extracted from that page on the retrieval date. They are statements about the retrieved document, not legal interpretations.
Everything about how this site's remover behaves is read from this site's own source files (app.js, index.html): the absence of network calls and storage APIs, the brush range, the 40-megapixel warning text, the input and output formats, and the export filename.
The readings labelled "inference" are mine. Getty has not stated the positions I inferred, and I did not find statements confirming or contradicting them.
This page contains no traffic estimates, difficulty scores, rankings, index counts or click counts.

FAQ

Is it legal to remove a Getty preview watermark? The license text I retrieved contains no clause about removing marks, so on the license itself: the edit is not addressed. What the clause addresses is use - comp use is test/sample for up to 30 days, never final or public. The broader legal question (copyright, CMI rules) does not depend on the tool and is quoted on Is Removing a Watermark Illegal?
Does removing the watermark make the image licensed? No. Licensing happens when you purchase it. The comp clause is explicit: "unless a license is purchased, content cannot be used in any final materials or any publicly available materials."
How long can I use a Getty comp? "Up to 30 days following download", for test or sample use only. Adobe's comp window is 90 days; Getty's is 30.
Can I use a cleaned comp in a client mockup? If that means showing it internally, to a client, as a preview of a layout - that is test/sample use within the 30 days, which the clause permits. If the mockup ships, prints or goes live, it has become a final or public material, and the clause forbids that regardless of the mark.
Do Getty's terms ban watermark removal? Not in the text I retrieved - the word "watermark" appears zero times in it. What the text does contain is quoted on this page: the use definition covering modify/edit, the comp clause, monitoring, termination, and an indemnity carve-out for modifications you make.
Will removing the watermark give me full quality? No. The comp file's detail is the ceiling. On this site the fill only propagates pixels the file already contains; nothing is invented and nothing is recovered.
Does this site keep or upload my image? No, and it is checkable: no fetch, XMLHttpRequest, WebSocket or sendBeacon anywhere in the tool's JavaScript, and no storage writes. The verification steps are on the upload-test page.
Can you remove a Getty watermark in Photoshop? The pixels come off the same way they do here - a propagation fill or any editor paints over the mark. What does not change is the license: a cleaned comp is still a comp, and the 30-day test/sample window and the final/public-use bar still apply. The mark was never what made the file usable.
Is removing a Getty watermark illegal? On the license text I retrieved, no - the word "watermark" appears zero times, so there is no contractual removal ban in that document. The separate copyright / CMI question (DMCA §1202 and its equivalents) does not depend on the tool and is quoted on Is Removing a Watermark Illegal?.
Does Getty know if you remove the watermark? The agreement I retrieved reserves the right to "monitor downloads and user activity" and to suspend access on breach - a contract monitoring right, not a claim about detecting edited pixels. This page makes no claim about Getty's technical detection ability, only about what the text says.