Image and source policy
Updated · Page structure updated; this date is not a price verification.
A product photo is the easiest thing on a site like this to take without permission, and the easiest thing to get caught taking. So the rule is written down.
The only images that may appear here
- Photographs we took ourselves, of a product we actually had in hand.
- Manufacturer or press-kit images, where written permission or a published licence covers this use, recorded with the date it was granted.
- Retailer images obtained through an authorized API, used under that API’s own rules. We have no such access today.
- Diagrams and original brand artwork created for TailVetted, including AI-assisted illustration. These may explain an idea or give the brand a visual voice, but they are recorded as illustrations and never used as evidence that a specific product was seen, owned or tested.
- Freely licensed photography for scenes that are not a specific product — a cat, a floor, a room. Licence read on the day of download and recorded, with a visible credit even where the licence does not require one.
What we will not do
- Download or host a retailer’s product image.
- Hotlink a retailer’s image without authorized API access.
- Treat an image as reusable merely because it loads in a browser.
- Generate an AI image of a specific real product. A picture of a product nobody photographed is a fabrication, and this site’s entire claim is that it does not fabricate.
- Show any illustration in a way that could be mistaken for a product photograph.
- Use Waffle, Mabel or any other brand character as a testing or approval label.
Where that leaves the catalog today
Of 12 product records, 0 have a photograph we took and 0 have a licensed image. The rest show a mechanism diagram or a plain marker saying no licensed image exists.
That is a visible gap and we would rather show the gap than fill it with someone else’s work. It closes in two ways: photographs of the products we buy for testing, and written permission from manufacturers, which we are asking for.
Sources for facts, not just pictures
The same principle applies to text. Every product record lists the sources it was built from and the date they were read. Every claim on a research page is either supported by a source listed on that page, or written as something we did not check. Manufacturer wording is always shown as a claim, attributed to the seller, never as a finding.
If we get it wrong
If you own an image or a piece of writing you believe is used here without a proper basis, contact us and it comes down while we check. We would rather lose a picture than argue about one.
The full register of every image, its licence and the date it was recorded lives in the repository at data/image-rights.json and public/image-credits.md.