HILIA is live — watermark what's yours, hide what's private

Every business that sells with pictures has felt it: you send a design proof and it turns up, uncredited, on someone else's page. Your product photos get lifted onto a copycat listing. A quote you emailed as an image does the rounds. Once an image leaves your hands, you lose the two things that matter — proof it's yours, and control over who sees what's attached to it.

HILIA — Hide Like A Pro — is our answer, and it's live today. It started life as an Android app for hiding files inside photos; it's now a full web tool that runs in your browser, with a free TYO ID sign-in. Two tools in one: watermarking that proves an image is yours, and steganography that moves a private file inside an ordinary picture.

Watermark what's yours

The watermark most businesses know is the visible kind, and HILIA does that — overlay your name or logo at any size, angle and opacity, as a single mark or the classic diagonal tile across the whole image. It runs entirely in your browser: the image never leaves your machine, no account needed.

The more interesting one is invisible. HILIA's covert watermark writes a short ID of your choosing — a client name, an order number — into the fabric of the image, locked to a secret key. To the eye, nothing changes. Months later, when a copy surfaces somewhere it shouldn't, run it through Detect with your key and HILIA tells you whether your mark is present, with a confidence score. Extract recovers the ID itself — which client's proof leaked, which batch the photo came from.

It's built to survive what images go through online — re-saving, format conversion, moderate resizing. We're honest about the limits: a heavy crop or a tiny thumbnail can degrade the mark past detection, so for images you expect to be mistreated, embed at higher strength and test your own pipeline first. The docs cover this without varnish.

If you followed our recent posts on AI product photography, here's the natural next step: generate the catalogue, then watermark it before it goes anywhere. A photographer's habit, available to every shop.

Hide what's private

The second tool is older than the web and still under-used: steganography. Give HILIA a photo and any file — a contract, a spreadsheet, an archive — and it weaves the file into the picture's pixels. What comes out looks like the same photo and opens like one. Only someone with the passcode gets the file back out.

The honest caveat: platforms that re-compress images on upload (most chat apps, most social media) destroy the hidden payload. Send the image as a file attachment and it arrives intact; the docs explain what's safe. HILIA also includes Probe and Capacity tools — check whether an image is carrying something, and how much a given photo can hold, before you commit.

What it costs

Most of HILIA is free with a free account. You pay only when you create a covert mark, using gas — TYO's simple pay-per-use credit — or take a membership and mark without counting.

Checking whether an image carries your mark is always free — you should never have to pay to find out something is yours.

For developers

If you'd rather mark every image in your pipeline automatically, the HILIA API exposes embed, extract and detect over HTTPS with per-key monthly quotas — mark on upload, scan on ingest.

Try it

The tool is at hilia.tyo.com.au/app, the docs at hilia.tyo.com.au/docs, and the original Android app still does hide-and-reveal on your phone. Sign in with the TYO ID you already use for Reach or Prism — one account across the family.

Next on the Journal: where HILIA goes from here — batch watermarking, and what gas and membership look like at volume.