Monday 23 June 2008

Find your photos online with Tineye

Want to know where you photos are online?  Well you could try searching the net yourself, or you could use TinEye

Tineye is still in private beta but you can apply for an invite (mine came through in a few days).  Once logged in, you can give TinEye your photo, and it will search the web for it.  A couple of points to note:

  • They have only indexed a small portion of the web so far (about 750 million images -  compare that to over 4 billion indexed by Google).  I did a few searches on my photos and found they didn’t pick up all instances where I knew it was online.
  • It doesn’t require an exact match.  This can be good in that it will find photos where they are slightly different (ie. with or without watermarks) or images manipulated (ie. Photoshopped, cropped, converted to B&W etc).

While it isn’t perfect at the moment, it is a great tool to have in the toolbox. 

It would also be very help for designers - Going to buy a photo but don’t know where else it has turned up? Do a search to avoid situations like this and this.  There is also a Firefox extension (and IE) so that you can right click on a photo on any website, select search and it will find all other indexed matches.

Check out their video:

Other commentary:

Techcrunch

Microstockdiaries

JMG galleries

Royalty Free ImagesShutterstock

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