Reverse Image Searching

1. TinEye: https://www.tineye.com/

About TinEye (from their about page and FAQs)

TinEye is a commercial image search and recognition company whose mission is to make images searchable. Users are able to submit an image to TinEye to discover where it came from, how it is being used, and if modified versions of the images exist. Rather than using metadata, keywords, or watermarks, TinEye uses image recognition technology to find matching images.

TinEye is continually crawling the web and updating their image database, and as of Feburary 7, 2018, has indexed 25,726,201,462 images. TinEye can be used for free for non-commercial use.

TinEye does not find similar images, such as an image with the same subject matter. Instead, it finds exact matches to the search image, including those that have been cropped, edited, or resized.

Uses

  • Help identify origins of unlabeled images
  • Track the appearance of an image in multiple online contexts
  • Find higher resolution versions of an image
  • Locate websites that use an image you have created
  • Discover modified or edited versions of an image

Things to note

  • Must use file formats JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF
  • Works best with images that are at least 300px in either dimension, but can accept as low as 100px
  • 20 MB max file size
  • Avoid images that are visibly watermarked

How to use TinEye

You can search TinEye by either uploading an image from your computer or by copy/pasting an image URL into the search box. You can also drag an image from a tab in your browser and drop it in another browser tab where TinEye is open.

When you search TinEye, your image is never saved or indexed. Searching with TinEye is private and secure.

TinEye’s search features make it easy to filter search results to find the image you are looking for. You can filter results by collection, which helps to identify the creator of an image or its copyright holder, or by stock, which tells you if an image is a stock photograph. You can also sort search results by best match, most changed, biggest image, newest, or oldest. You can compare the search and result image by using their compare feature, which highlights any differences between the two images.

2. Google reverse image search

Differences with TinEye:

  • When searching for similar images not only exact matches
  • Results include websites that include the image
  • Results discover widely used images, and can sometimes make it difficult to source.
  • TinEye searches through databases of heavily copyrighted images. Google indexes anything on the web using its algorithms.

Activity

  1. Use TinEye to learn about any of the images below. Clicking the image will open the media file in a new page, and then you can download the image or drag and drop it into TinEye.

NOR Livets dans, ENG Dance of Life testimage3 sculpturetofind

2. Repeat for Google Image Search

3. Try uploading an image from your phone using, https://reverse.photos/