Marco van Oirschot
Founder of ImageTrace, Rotterdam, the Netherlands
My name is Marco van Oirschot and I am the founder of ImageTrace, the self-serve image-rights monitoring and evidence tool for photographers and image makers. I run it through Volantis, the Rotterdam software company I have been building products with since 2021.
I am a software developer by trade. Through Volantis I build .NET and Angular business software for clients, and alongside that work we develop and run our own products. ImageTrace is one of them. It started as an in-house tool I built for my uncle, who runs a media company that kept finding its photos reused online without permission.
I built ImageTrace on a simple conviction: finding your stolen work should not cost you a percentage of what you recover. Where many services take 30 to 50 percent of every settlement, ImageTrace charges one flat price and the photographer keeps everything they collect.
Areas of focus
- Reverse image search and match verification for photographers
- Turning a found match into court-ready evidence (URL, screenshot, capture, editable letter)
- The economics of image-rights enforcement: flat-fee, no-commission, photographer-in-control
- EU-hosted, GDPR-compliant handling of creators' work
- You keep 100 percent of what you recover. ImageTrace handles detection and evidence, not the legal process, so whatever you collect, and whatever you choose to do with it, stays entirely yours.
Why I built ImageTrace
Building that first version showed me how much manual work it takes just to document a single case, and how little of that work photographers should have to do themselves. When I looked at the tools that already existed, most worked on commission and took a large share of any settlement, sometimes 30 to 50 percent, which quietly priced out the photographers who needed help most. After seeing more and more photographers online asking for exactly this kind of tool, I decided to open ImageTrace up to everyone and build it around the opposite idea: do the hard detection and evidence work, charge one flat price, and leave the photographer in control of what happens next.
ImageTrace is deliberately not a law firm and not a collection agency. It finds the matches and hands over a ready-to-send evidence report. The photographer decides what happens next: invoice, request a takedown, escalate, or let it go. That "you stay in control" stance is the product's whole reason to exist.
How we approach what we publish
The ImageTrace blog is written to help photographers act, not to sell. Articles on reverse image search, cease-and-desist letters, damages, and tool comparisons are based on how the product actually works and on real image-rights practice in the EU.
- We write from hands-on experience building and running the detection and evidence workflow.
- We are explicit about what ImageTrace does and does not do, including when another tool may fit better.
- We do not invent statistics or reviews. Where we cite numbers, we cite the source.
- Corrections are made openly when we get something wrong.