Leak Tracer marks a copy with a recipient tag. Some crops and edits can be read, but recovery depends on the image and is not guaranteed.
Some crops still read.
On generated images resembling photos at strength 8, the updated decoder recovered 76 cropped copies with no wrong tags. These included an 8 pixel shave from every edge, 2%, 5% and 10% crops from every edge, center crops, and all 64 pixel alignments. Eight untagged generated images produced no verified tag.
This is a small test, not a guarantee for other images or edits.
Resizing changes the picture.
In one bounded experiment, a generated image was reduced to 75% using bilinear interpolation, then restored at five candidate scales. One candidate returned the correct tag and none returned a wrong tag.
The decoder does not perform this scale search automatically. Resizing and screenshots can make tags unreadable.
A measured result, not a promise.
On October 25, 2026, the earlier decoder was tested in Chromium on two generated images resembling photos, not camera photos. Its 103 decodes included JPEG recompression down to q50 and several light edits. There were 0 wrong tags and 0 false positives in that battery.
The updated decoder keeps the original aligned decoding path, but that earlier battery has not been repeated in full. Safari and Firefox have not been tested.
Do not rely on a tag surviving an edit or platform upload. A missing tag does not prove that an image was never marked.