TinEye – A Reverse Image Search That Seems to Work Sometimes

From tineye.com :

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks.

I tried it with a small thumbnail of my most popular Flickr photo.

And it found some (4) posts in RBD message boards that had used the image without notifying me. Big deal. I suspect there are more. I really am fine with that.

I searched for this image, too:

And there were no results — even though we can see that The New Yorker is using it in their blogs. (With proper credit this time)

So, it ain’t perfect. But for people who are paranoid about their images getting used in blogs, TinEye eventually could provide hours of vengeful fun.

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