Left alone, a booking photo can stay on the internet indefinitely, which is really the honest answer to how long do mugshots stay on the internet. Public records laws make the original photo available to anyone, and once a commercial site copies it, that copy lives on independently with no expiration. What you can do is force removal through state statutes, expungement documentation, direct requests, and search engine tools. Done well, that combination moves the photo out of the places people actually look.
Why the Photo Doesn’t Expire on Its Own
State public records laws treat arrest information, including booking photos, as documents the public has a right to access. Police departments and sheriff’s offices publish them, and anyone can legally copy and republish them. A single arrest can generate a photo that lands on dozens of websites within days, and each copy is independent of the others. Taking the original off a government database does nothing to the copies already scattered across commercial sites, cached search results, and social media posts. You are not dealing with one photo in one place. You are dealing with an image that multiplied the moment it became public.
Government Sites and Commercial Sites Are Different Problems
The removal path depends on which type of site is hosting your photo.
Official government sites, like a local police department or county jail, publish booking photos as part of routine record-keeping. If your record is later expunged or sealed, these agencies are generally required to restrict public access. The process usually involves submitting your expungement order directly to the agency and waiting for them to update their records.
Commercial mugshot sites are a different animal. These for-profit businesses scrape booking photos from public databases and republish them with your full name and arrest details. Their revenue model historically relied on charging people hundreds of dollars to take down their own photos, a practice that drew enough public outrage that more than a dozen states have passed laws targeting it. Getting a photo off a government site is a records issue. Getting it off a commercial site may involve consumer protection law, and sometimes a fight.
What Expungement Actually Does
A widespread misconception is that expunging your record scrubs your mugshot from the internet. It doesn’t. Expungement is a court order that seals or destroys the official government record of your arrest or conviction.1National Institute of Justice. Expungement: Criminal Records as Reentry Barriers Government agencies that receive the order must comply. Commercial websites that already copied and published your photo are not parties to that order, are not automatically notified, and in many cases have no idea the record was expunged until you tell them.
Expungement is still worth pursuing if you’re eligible. It triggers the obligation for government agencies and background check companies to stop reporting the record, and it gives you the legal documentation you need to demand removal from commercial sites. In states with mugshot removal laws, proof of expungement or dismissal often unlocks stronger protections, including shorter removal deadlines and steeper penalties for non-compliance. Think of expungement as the key that opens the door to other remedies.
State Laws That Force Commercial Sites to Take Photos Down
More than a dozen states have enacted laws that directly regulate commercial mugshot websites. The specifics vary, but these laws share common features. They prohibit or limit removal fees, set mandatory deadlines for taking down photos after a written request, and impose financial penalties on sites that refuse.
Some states ban removal fees entirely. Others cap the fee at $50 but require free removal when the underlying charge was dismissed, the person was acquitted, or the record was expunged. Removal deadlines typically range from 7 to 30 days after the site receives a valid written request, with the shorter timeframes reserved for cases where the person can prove a favorable outcome.
Penalties are designed to have teeth. Depending on the state, a commercial site that ignores a valid request can face daily civil penalties ranging from $50 to $1,000 per day the photo remains visible after the deadline. Sites that remove a photo and then republish it face even steeper fines. Courts can also award attorney fees and costs, which compounds the financial risk to the website operator.
These laws don’t help everyone equally. If you live in a state without such a statute, or if the commercial site operates from another jurisdiction, enforcement becomes harder. Even then, general consumer protection statutes may apply to the practice of charging for removal of public records.
Removing the Photo, Step by Step
Before contacting anyone, gather your documentation. You’ll need your full legal name, date of birth, date of arrest, the name of the arresting agency, and the case or booking number. If your charges were dismissed, you were acquitted, or your record was expunged, get certified copies of the court orders proving it. Search your name online and compile a list of every URL where the mugshot appears. Check image search results too, not just regular web results.
Government Sites
Start with official sources. If the arresting agency’s website still shows your booking photo and your record has been expunged or sealed, contact the agency’s records division directly. Most have a process for these requests, though it may require you to mail or hand-deliver a certified copy of the court order. Government agencies are legally obligated to comply with expungement orders, so this is usually the most straightforward removal you’ll do.
Commercial Sites
Commercial mugshot sites require more persistence. Look for a “Contact Us” or “Removal Request” page. Your written request should include your name, the URL where the photo appears, and a copy of any court documents showing the case was resolved in your favor. Keep the tone factual and professional.
Send the request by a method that creates a paper trail. Certified mail with return receipt is ideal because it proves the date the site received your request, which matters if removal deadlines and daily penalties apply under your state’s law. If you send the request by email, follow up with a hard copy. Document everything. If the site ignores you or demands a fee that’s illegal in your state, that paper trail becomes the foundation for legal action.
If a site refuses to cooperate, consult an attorney who handles internet privacy or consumer protection cases. The daily penalty provisions in many state statutes mean that by the time a case reaches court, the accumulated fines can far exceed what it costs to hire a lawyer. Some attorneys take these cases on contingency for exactly that reason.
Cleaning Up Search Results
Even after a mugshot is taken down from its source website, the page can linger in search engine results for weeks or months because search engines rely on cached data. Getting it out of search results is a separate step, and the one that matters most for day-to-day reputation.
Google offers a tool to request removal of personal information from search results. Eligible categories include personal contact information, confidential government IDs, financial account numbers, and content hosted on sites with exploitative removal practices.2Google. Remove Personal Sexual Images From Google Search Results That last category describes the exact business model of commercial mugshot sites that charge for removal. Google provides a content removal request form where you can submit the specific URLs you want reviewed.3Google. Remove My Private Info From Google Search
If the mugshot has already been deleted from the source website but still appears in Google’s search results, you can use Google’s Refresh Outdated Content tool to speed up the process. This tells Google to re-crawl the page and update its index to reflect that the content is gone. Other major search engines offer similar outdated-content removal tools, and the step is worth doing for each one.
Search engine removal only affects what appears in search results. It doesn’t delete the image from the website itself. If someone navigates directly to a commercial mugshot site and searches your name there, they can still find it unless the site also removes it. The most effective approach combines source-site removal with search engine cleanup.
What Removal Costs
If you live in a state with a mugshot removal law, sending written requests to commercial sites is free beyond postage and certified mail fees. The point of those laws is to prohibit or cap what sites can charge you.
Doing the work yourself, even without a state law backing you up, costs nothing but time. Many commercial sites will quietly remove photos after receiving a polite, documented request, especially if they want to avoid legal exposure. The challenge is repetition. If your photo appears on 15 different sites, you’re sending 15 separate requests and following up on each one.
Paid mugshot removal services handle the legwork for you. Prices generally start around $250 per mugshot per site, with package deals for multiple removals. Before hiring anyone, verify that the service is legitimate. The industry has attracted scammers, including operators who have financial relationships with the very sites posting the photos. An attorney who handles consumer protection or internet privacy cases is often a better investment, particularly if you have expungement documentation and the sites are in jurisdictions with penalty provisions.
The most cost-effective path for most people is to handle the initial removal requests yourself, use Google’s free tools to clean up search results, and escalate to an attorney only if a site refuses to comply within the legal deadline. An attorney’s demand letter, backed by the threat of daily statutory penalties, tends to produce results fast.
Copyright Is Not a Tool You Can Use
You might wonder whether you can file a copyright claim to force a website to take down your booking photo. You almost certainly can’t, because you don’t own the image. Copyright belongs to the photographer or their employer, and a booking photo is taken by a law enforcement agency. Filing a DMCA takedown notice for your own mugshot would be legally groundless unless you somehow hold the rights to the image. Agencies themselves could theoretically use copyright to fight commercial sites, but in practice they don’t.
Background Check Protections While the Photo Is Still Up
Removal takes time, and in the meantime a background check is where an old mugshot does the most damage. Federal law provides a meaningful safety net. The Fair Credit Reporting Act limits what background check companies can report. For positions paying under $75,000 per year, a consumer reporting agency cannot include an arrest that never led to a conviction if more than seven years have passed since the arrest date.4Office of the Law Revision Counsel. United States Code Title 15 Section 1681c The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has stated that background check companies must maintain procedures to prevent reporting information that has been expunged, sealed, or legally restricted from public access, and that any reported arrest must include its disposition, so a background check shouldn’t show an arrest without also showing that the charges were dropped or dismissed.5Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Fair Credit Reporting; Background Screening These rules don’t take the photo off the internet, but they limit how far the information travels through formal channels while you work on the removal process.