Image Credits

1. What you are looking at

None of the product photographs on this site are ours. Every one of them is the image the manufacturer itself publishes on that model’s Amazon US listing. We do not run a studio, we do not shoot product photography and we do not commission it. At the time of writing, 27 models are illustrated with a listing photograph. Any model that has no usable listing photograph would be illustrated with an in-house drawing, labelled as a drawing rather than passed off as a photograph. The table in section 5 lists every one.

The files are re-encoded as WebP and served from this site’s own domain rather than linked from the retailer’s image CDN, so that reading a page here does not make your browser contact a third party. Re-encoding changes the file format, not the picture: nothing is cropped, retouched, recoloured or composited, and no watermark, badge or overlay is added to any of them.

2. The basis on which we use them

We claim no copyright in these images and we have no licence from the brands to use them. We show them to identify the specific model being discussed — the model named in the heading of the page you found it on, and nowhere else. In United States law that use rests on the doctrine of nominative fair use, which turns on three things. All three are structural rules on this site rather than good intentions:

1. The product cannot reasonably be identified without the image. A reader choosing between a Saros 10R and an X60 Max Ultra needs to see which is which. Describing a vacuum in prose does not do that, and a generic illustration of “a robot vacuum” would actively mislead, because the shape of the product is precisely what is being compared.
2. We use no more than identification requires. One to four whole, unaltered listing images per model, at the size the page layout needs them. Every one is taken from that model’s own listing gallery and from nowhere else — no campaign material, no lifestyle photography supplied outside the listing, and never a photograph of one model on a page about a different one. Some listing galleries are the brand’s own annotated graphics, with performance figures printed into the pixels. Where that is the case we reproduce them unaltered and say so on the page, and the figures inside them are labelled as the brand’s claims rather than ours, because a reader comparing models should see exactly what the manufacturer asserts.
3. Nothing here suggests endorsement. Every page states that no brand has any commercial relationship with this site — no sponsorship, no payment, no pre-publication review. No manufacturer sees a page before it is published, and none has ever asked us to change one. The editorial policy sets out those rules in full.

Where an image could not satisfy all three, it does not go on the site. In practice that has meant dropping images that only exist as a brand’s advertising creative.

Re-encoding is worth one more sentence, because it is the thing people assume we are quietly doing something with. Converting a JPEG to WebP is a lossy compression step, in the same way a photograph is compressed by any CDN. We do not use it to edit content, and the derivatives are generated mechanically by a build script rather than chosen by hand.

Where a photograph appears is as much a part of the basis as why it appears. A model’s own review page opens with it. A category page shows the model currently leading that ranking, captioned with its name. A guide shows the models it recommends, each captioned with the pick it is. The homepage tiles name the model on them. In each case the label naming the product sits with the picture, so a reader is never shown a product photograph without being told which product it is — an unlabelled product photo in generic surroundings would be decoration, and decoration is not a use we claim.

3. What is ours, and what is not

We make no copyright claim over the second list and we assert no rights in it. Where our own terms of service say the content of this site is ours, that sentence excludes third-party photography and brand names.

4. What we will not do with them

• We will not sell them, licence them, or supply them to anyone else.
• We will not use them in advertising, in this site’s own promotion, or as a logo. That includes the card that appears when a page here is shared on social media — it is drawn in-house, precisely so that no manufacturer’s photograph is pressed into service as this site’s branding.
• We will not retouch a product to make it look better than it is, or worse.
• We will not show a photograph of a product we have not covered, and we will not show one on a page where a different product is the subject. A listing photo is not decoration.
• We will not imply that a brand has reviewed, approved or sponsored a page. It has not.
• We will not pass a listing photograph off as a picture of what a reader will actually receive, beyond what the manufacturer itself shows — a listing image can include accessories, optional parts or a dock variant that the base configuration does not ship with. The manufacturer’s own listing is the authority on what is in the box.

5. Model-by-model source list

Every model covered on this site, with the listing its photograph was read from. The ASIN is recorded as a citation so the source can be checked — this site builds no purchase link from it, and publishes no prices.

The brand named beneath each model is the brand whose listing the photograph was published on — it is not a verified statement of who owns the copyright. For most of these models that will be the manufacturer, but it may be a photographer or agency contracted by it, and we have no way to tell which from the listing alone. Section 6 is there for whoever the owner turns out to be.

6. If you are a rights holder

If you own one of these images and would rather it were not on this site, write to hello@smarthomeverdict.com with the model and the page. We will replace it with an in-house drawing or remove the figure and adjust the layout.

You do not need to establish anything for us to act. We are not asking for a takedown notice, a legal argument or a reason — this page exists to explain our position, not to defend it, and a page is not worth an argument with the people who made the product it describes. If you would prefer a different image, such as one of your own choosing, send it and we will credit it as you ask.

The same address handles corrections. If a photograph on a page does not match the model that page is about, that is our error, not a rights question, and we would like to hear about it either way.

7. Related

• Editorial policy — the independence rules, the corrections policy and the trademark position.
• Terms of service — the intellectual property clause these credits sit under.
• About SmartHomeVerdict — who runs the site and how it is funded.