Mark AI generated images: visible badge plus machine-readable IPTC / C2PA label, written losslessly — the practical side of EU AI Act disclosure.

SEO'n'AI – AI Image check&mark

<p>Mark your AI generated images — visibly for your visitors, machine-readably for everything else. One click in the media library gives an image both halves of the disclosure: a badge wherever the image appears on your site, and an IPTC / C2PA provenance label written losslessly into the file itself.</p>
<p>If the EU AI Act&#8217;s transparency rules are on your mind: this is the technical half of that disclosure. Whether it satisfies your obligations is a legal question, and the FAQ below is honest about it.</p>
<p>This is not a watermark plugin. It works on the layer underneath: the provenance metadata inside your image files. Image generators are increasingly expected to embed a machine-readable marking — an IPTC <code>DigitalSourceType</code> value in XMP, or a C2PA manifest. SEO&#8217;n&#8217;AI &#8211; AI Image check&amp;mark opens your files and reads it. It tells you which images carry such a marking, which do not — and it can write the missing label into them.</p>
<h4>What makes this different</h4>
<ul>
<li>It <strong>labels both layers at once</strong>. Marking an image gives it the visible badge on the page and the machine-readable marking in the file — the human-readable and the machine-readable side of the same disclosure.</li>
<li>It <strong>writes losslessly</strong>. The XMP packet is inserted into the container by hand — JPEG APP1, PNG <code>iTXt</code>, WebP RIFF chunk. The compressed image data is copied through byte for byte. Nothing is re-encoded, no quality is lost. Watermarking plugins cannot do this, because re-encoding is how they work.</li>
<li>It <strong>does not touch a single pixel</strong>. The badge is a CSS overlay you can restyle or switch off at any moment.</li>
<li>It <strong>reads</strong> provenance metadata, too. Uploads are inspected on arrival; if the file declares itself as AI generated — via IPTC in XMP or a <strong>C2PA / Content Credentials</strong> manifest — the image is marked automatically. No other step needed.</li>
<li>It tells you <strong>where the badge does not appear</strong> — bluntly, on its own settings screen, instead of letting you assume it is everywhere.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>A per-image checkbox in the attachment details panel, and a one-click &#8220;Mark as AI generated&#8221; link on every row of the media list</li>
<li>A <strong>Marking details</strong> screen per image: what the file actually carries — IPTC DigitalSourceType, C2PA, per generated size — including the raw XMP block, so you can verify rather than trust</li>
<li>A badge — the visible AI label — in the corner of every image WordPress renders, with configurable text, position, size and style</li>
<li>An honest alt text, so screen reader users get the disclosure too</li>
<li>A <code>data-ai-generated="true"</code> attribute on the image tag</li>
<li>Detection of an existing marking (IPTC DigitalSourceType, C2PA) on upload, per image, for a hand-picked selection, and as one run across the whole library</li>
<li>Automatic marking of uploads whose file already declares itself as AI generated</li>
<li>Writing the marking into new uploads <strong>and into images already in your library</strong>, one at a time, or as one batch run over everything that is missing it</li>
<li>A filter and a status column in the media library</li>
</ul>
<p>Neither the reading nor the writing is held back: you can examine every image in your library, and write the marking into every image that needs one, with no limits and no quota. For running your own site, this plugin is complete.</p>
<p>A file is never given a second metadata block. If it already carries XMP from another tool — a photo editor, a stock library — that block is left exactly as it is and the plugin says so instead of writing next to it.</p>
<h4>Honest about the limits</h4>
<p>The badge — the visible half of the label — is a CSS overlay. It appears where WordPress renders the page, and nowhere else. It does <strong>not</strong> appear in:</p>
<ul>
<li>Social media previews — the platform loads the file, not your page</li>
<li>The image file itself, when downloaded or opened by direct URL</li>
<li>RSS feeds and newsletters</li>
<li>Lightboxes that rebuild the image element</li>
<li>Google Images, scrapers and hotlinking third parties</li>
</ul>
<p>Images used as a CSS background used to be on that list as well. Page builders lean on backgrounds heavily — sliders, hero areas and section headers are almost always backgrounds rather than image tags — so a site could look completely unbadged while everything was in fact working. The <strong>smart check</strong> closes that gap: switch it on and the finished page is inspected once before it is sent, including the stylesheet files on your server, and the badge is placed onto whatever element carries a marked background. It is off by default, because it looks at the whole page.</p>
<p>One thing to remember either way: if you run a caching plugin, clear its cache after marking an image. A cached page was built before the marking existed and keeps being served exactly as it was, so the badge looks missing when the page is simply old.</p>
<p>The plugin says all of this plainly on its own settings screen, under &#8220;Where it reaches&#8221;, along with ways to deal with what is left.</p>
<h4>Optional add-on</h4>
<p><strong>SEO&#8217;n&#8217;AI &#8211; AI Image check&amp;mark Pro</strong> is a separate, paid plugin from the author&#8217;s own shop, built for agencies and editors maintaining large libraries as a service. Its centrepiece is burning the badge into the image files themselves, across every generated size, with a backup of the originals and a one-click restore; around that it adds batch tooling for large libraries. None of that code is in this plugin, and this plugin never downloads it — if you want it, you install it yourself.</p>
<h3>Disclaimer</h3>
<p>This plugin is a tool, not legal advice and not a compliance guarantee. It marks the images you tell it to mark. It cannot detect AI generated images on its own, and it cannot guarantee that a badge appears in contexts it does not control. The author accepts no liability for missing, incorrect or removed markings, for damage to image files, or for any legal consequences arising from the use of this plugin. Keep backups.</p>


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