img2dataset

What img2dataset does

img2dataset is not one company's crawler but a free tool that turns lists of image URLs into packaged datasets, capable of downloading a hundred million images in a day on a single machine; it played a role in assembling the large image datasets behind well-known image-generation models. It does not read robots.txt. Its opt-out mechanism is HTTP headers: by default it skips images served with X-Robots-Tag directives noai, noimageai, noindex, or noimageindex - but whoever runs it can disable that check with a single flag, and the identifying user-agent token is optional too. What shows up in your logs therefore depends entirely on who is running it and how politely.

Why it visits your site

Someone is harvesting images, most likely from a URL list your site appears on rather than by crawling your pages directly.

The bigger picture: AI training crawlers

Training crawlers are the most economically lopsided visitors your server has. A search crawler takes your content and pays you back in ranked listings and click-throughs; a training crawler takes the same content to improve a commercial model and, by design, sends nothing in return. The visit itself is the entire transaction. That asymmetry is why training bots - not AI in general - are where most of the blocking debate actually lives, and why the publishing industry's response has split between refusal and negotiation: several large publishers block these crawlers outright, while others have signed licensing deals with the same operators. Both strategies start from the same place - knowing, concretely, how much of your archive is being read and by whom.

The norms here are young and still hardening. The better operators now publish user agents, IP ranges, and opt-out tokens, and honor robots.txt; others publish nothing and, by widely credited reports, crawl through disallow rules. Treat each crawler on its record rather than assuming the category behaves uniformly - and remember that a robots.txt line only ever governs the polite end of the spectrum.

Should you block it?

robots.txt will not help, because the tool never reads it. The documented levers are the X-Robots-Tag headers it honors by default, plus server-level blocking of the img2dataset user-agent string. If your images are your product, set the headers - other image crawlers respect them too - and accept that a determined operator can strip every identifier and evade all of it.

Block via robots.txt

Add these lines to the robots.txt at your site root to ask img2dataset to stay away:

User-agent: img2dataset
Disallow: /

Remember that robots.txt is a request, not a lock - compliance is voluntary, and enforcement happens at the server. Viz's AI Control pairs robots.txt rules with server-level 403 responses and then probes your site to verify the block is actually holding.

How to see img2dataset traffic on your site

You have three windows onto it, each with a catch. Raw hosting access logs contain every img2dataset request, but many managed WordPress hosts don't expose them, and when they do you are grepping text files by hand. A CDN dashboard sees the traffic at the edge, but it lives outside WordPress and speaks in totals, not in your site's terms. And JavaScript analytics - GA4 and friends - will never show it at all, because img2dataset doesn't run scripts.

Viz's answer is the request log: filter to img2dataset and read exactly which URLs it fetched and when, right inside wp-admin - then watch the same filter after any blocking decision to see whether the visits stopped, slowed, or kept coming.