No. Expungement does not remove your mugshot. A court order seals or destroys the official record inside the government system that holds it. Your booking photo lives somewhere else entirely: a private mugshot site that scraped it from a county database the day you were arrested. That site has no relationship with the court at all. The judge signing your expungement order has no effect on it unless someone makes it have an effect.
Why the court cannot touch it
Mugshot sites are commercial operations, not government archives. They pull booking photos from public police and jail rosters, often within hours of an arrest, and publish them with a name, a charge, and a location. Some of these sites then charge a fee to take the photo down. That is exactly the predatory model that gives the entire category a bad reputation.
An expungement order changes the legal status of your case. It does not send any message to the private site holding a copy of your photo. The two systems are not connected.
What actually gets it taken down
The strongest lever, where it exists, is state law. More than a dozen states have passed statutes that either ban charging a fee for mugshot removal or require removal within a set window once a request is made. California, Georgia, Ohio, and Florida all have some version of this on the books. Citing the specific statute in your removal request gives a legitimate site a clear legal reason to comply rather than push back. It gives a stubborn site something you can escalate to the state attorney general if it ignores you.
Your expungement or dismissal order is the second piece. Attach a copy to your written request. It shows a court has already found the record should not be public. That removes any argument the site might make about the accuracy of what it is publishing.
What we do not recommend, ever, is paying the removal fee. It funds the same business model that created the problem. It does not reliably stop the photo from reappearing on another domain the same operator controls. Our complete guide on removing a mugshot from Google covers the state-by-state statutes, the exact demand letter approach, and what to do when a site refuses to respond.
The step after the site takes it down
Getting the photo off the source site is only half the job. Google's cache can keep showing the page for days or weeks after it is gone. The image can still surface separately in Google Images. Our guide on removing a mugshot from Google after expungement walks through the exact sequence, including the specific Google tools that clear a page once the source has been taken down.
If you would rather have us handle it
We work mugshot removals every day, using the state statute where one applies, your expungement order as the backbone of the request, and direct pressure everywhere else. This is one surface among several that usually need attention after an expungement. Our expungement reputation cleanup service covers the whole footprint, the photo included.
If you are ready, tell us which sites have your photo and we will take it from there.