Screenshot the price before you send anything
Open the page and copy the exact URL, then screenshot whatever the site is asking you to pay. The price isn't trivia here. Utah, Oregon and Wyoming only reach a website that charges a fee to remove a booking photograph, and Texas doesn't reach an entity at all unless it charges $150 or more to remove, or any fee to correct. A site that takes the photo down for free sits outside all four.
Don't pay, and don't negotiate the price down. California and Missouri both count every payment as a separate violation, so a site that charges you is stacking its own liability, but paying still takes the demand off the screen and buys you nothing you can enforce. Keep the screenshot in the same folder as the URL, because once the page changes it's the only proof the site was ever charging.
Write down what identifies the photo, because two of these statutes require it inside the letter. Florida wants specific information identifying the arrest booking photograph. South Carolina wants a complete and accurate description of where the records are located, including the URL and the e-edition if there is one. Copy the address character for character, and note any record or booking number the page prints next to your name.
The state you were arrested in is the state whose law you use
Where you live now usually doesn't decide this. South Carolina's section covers a person arrested and booked in South Carolina. Missouri defines a booking photograph as one taken in this state by an arresting law enforcement agency, and Georgia uses the same words. California runs the other way: Civil Code 1798.91.1 defines a booking photograph as one taken pursuant to an arrest, with no in-state limit, and subdivision (f) puts venue in the county where you live, so a California resident arrested in another state can still sue a site that charges them. So before anything else, write down the state of the arrest, your name, the date of the arrest, and the name of the arresting agency. South Carolina and Georgia both require the last three inside the request, and Georgia also wants your date of birth.
Then find which family your state is in. Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Oregon, Wyoming and Utah put a deadline on the website, so a written request is the whole remedy and it works without a lawyer. Arizona, California, Missouri, Virginia and Illinois make the fee unlawful and stop there. Illinois adds a five-business-day duty to correct an error, but only on a site that charges, and correcting a record isn't taking it down.
Two statutes turn up on every list of these laws and neither one gives you anything to mail. Colorado's booking-photo section is 24-72-305.5, and it governs who may obtain a copy from the records custodian, making it an unclassified misdemeanor to get one for a pay-to-remove site. It puts no duty on the website. Georgia has two statutes and only one is yours: 35-1-19 restricts what the arresting agency may hand out, and 10-1-393.5 is the one that orders a removal.
Get the disposition document, certified where the statute says certified
Call the clerk of courts in the county that handled the case and ask for a certified copy of your disposition, with your docket number and arrest date in front of you when you dial. South Carolina is the strict one: Section 17-1-60 requires certified documentation that the original charges were discharged, dismissed, expunged, or that you were found not guilty. A screenshot of an online docket isn't certified documentation, and sending one gets you nothing.
Georgia's list of triggers is the longest. The eight in O.C.G.A. 10-1-393.5 include acquittal, dismissal, charges never referred for prosecution, an expired statute of limitations, two no bills from a grand jury, and a drug possession conviction where you completed probation successfully. ORS 646A.806 and W.S. 40-12-601 take paper or electronic copies of official court or law enforcement records instead, and Oregon alone also covers charges reduced to violations. Both sit inside a full-chapter document, so search the section number on arrival.
Utah Code 17-72-802 runs two tracks off one letter. Attach evidence of an acquittal, non-prosecution, expungement, vacatur or pardon and the site gets seven calendar days and can't charge you a cent. Send a bare request with nothing attached and it gets thirty days and may lawfully charge you up to $50. Florida goes the other way and asks for no disposition at all, only sufficient proof of identification and which photograph you mean.
Mail it to the registered agent, in the class your statute names
Florida Statute 901.43 says registered mail to the registered agent, and nothing else satisfies it. Not the contact form, not the support address printed on the page. Look the publisher up by name on the Florida Division of Corporations Search Records page, open its filing, and copy the registered agent's name and street address off it. Registered Mail is bought at a Post Office counter and handed to a clerk, so budget the trip.
South Carolina and Georgia both want certified mail, return receipt requested, and both let you address it to the registered agent, the principal place of business, or the primary residence. Georgia also accepts statutory overnight delivery. South Carolina's letter carries your name, arrest date, arresting agency, the certified documentation and the URL. Georgia's carries your name, date of birth, arrest date and arresting agency. Look the company up on South Carolina's Business Name Search.
Oregon, Wyoming and Utah only say the request has to be in writing, with no mail class attached. Send it certified anyway, because the return receipt is what proves when the clock started. Texas works differently: the entity has to publish an email address, fax number or mailing address for disputes, so send yours to the address the site published rather than drafting a demand letter to an agent.
Put the deadline on a calendar the day you mail it
Florida is ten calendar days. South Carolina, Georgia, Oregon and Wyoming are thirty. Utah is thirty calendar days on a bare request and seven calendar days when you attached the disposition evidence. Write that date on the folder holding your screenshot, your URL list and your mailing receipt, because the day after it is when the statute stops being a request and starts being a claim.
The clocks don't all start in the same place, and this is where people miscount. Florida and South Carolina run from receipt, so the delivery date on the return receipt is day zero. Georgia runs from the sending of the request. Oregon, Wyoming and Utah run from the date of the request itself. Keep the postmarked receipt and the signed return receipt, because between them they prove both dates.
Two of these clocks aren't removal clocks at all. Illinois 815 ILCS 505/2QQQ gives a site that charges five business days to fix an error after you send a certified letter demanding the correction and providing documentation of the correct information, with $100 a day and attorney's fees if it doesn't. Texas gives an entity forty-five business days to finish investigating your dispute and five business days after that to write to you with the result. Neither one ends with the page gone.
When the deadline passes and the photo is still up
Florida hands you an injunction. Once the ten days lapse you can sue to enjoin the publication, and the court may impose $1,000 a day for noncompliance with that injunction, $5,000 a day if the site republishes the photo after taking it down, plus your attorney fees and costs. Refusing after a written request is separately an unfair or deceptive trade practice under Chapter 501.
Utah pays $50 a day past the thirty-day deadline and $100 a day past the seven-day one, plus costs and fees, and a fee demanded on that seven-day track is theft by extortion. Oregon and Wyoming route a violation through the state's unfair trade practices act, which in Wyoming means the enforcing authority can move, not only you. South Carolina's takedown subsection is carved out of the criminal penalty, so a failure to remove there is a lawsuit and not a charge.
In the five states that only ban the fee, the number is the entire remedy. Missouri is the biggest: $10,000, or actual and punitive damages, whichever is greater, plus fees, and its statute says humiliation or embarrassment alone shows damages with no physical manifestation required. California is the greater of $1,000 per violation or actual damages, and you can file in the county where you live. Arizona escalates to $500 a day, and Virginia is actual damages or $500.
What none of these laws does
No state on this page bans publishing your mugshot. Arrest records are public, so every one of these statutes goes after the pay-to-remove transaction or the supply of the photograph instead. Several then carve themselves back out. Virginia, Illinois and Texas each say the section imposes no liability on an interactive computer service, and Arizona, South Carolina and Texas exempt news organizations, so the paper that ran your booking photo is untouched by all of it.
Florida only reaches two kinds of site: one that solicits or accepts payment to remove, and one whose primary business model is publishing booking photographs commercially. A general news site republishing your photo sits outside it. And check your section number before you cite anything, because Utah's law moved from 17-22-30 to 17-72-802 when the legislature renumbered it in 2025, and most pages listing these laws still print the old one.
Thirteen states are named on this page, and they're the ones whose statutes we read end to end. If yours isn't here, that isn't proof it has nothing, so ask the clerk or a lawyer where you were arrested. The harder limit is collection, because plenty of these operators sit offshore, which makes a statute leverage for a demand letter and a payment-processor complaint rather than money you'll actually see. None of it seals or expunges the court's own file or the sheriff's roster.