TinEye, an image search engine
by Celine Roque
Have you ever looked at an image and thought, I think I’ve seen that somewhere. Problem is, you couldn’t quite place it. Wouldn’t it be great to just grab a picture and run it through a search engine? Google has an image search, but it runs on keywords, not real image comparisons. As we wait for them to develop and polish one, in the meantime, we can use tools such as TinEye.
TinEye, created by Idée Inc, is a reverse image search engine. Upload an image and this tool will tell you where matches can be found on the web, so that you can trace the original source, possibly learn about its history and get a hi-res version. If you are the owner or creator of an image, use TinEye to track how your work is being used by others, and see the modifications they’ve done, if any.
Like most modern search engines, TinEye uses crawlers to look for images around the web. Right now they have over a billion images on their index – quite a small number if you think about the ever-expanding volume of Internet content. Here’s how it works:
“When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in our index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match. TinEye does not typically find similar images (i.e. a different image with the same subject matter [faces]); it finds exact matches including those that have been cropped, edited or resized [logos, symbols].”
The search engine works with JPEG, PNG and GIF files, with optimum results for images greater than 300×300 pixels and without clear watermarks. Maximum file size accepted is 1MB. For unregistered users, uploaded images are automatically discarded after 72 hours. Registration is free, and allows you to keep the file and retain a permalink to the query.
To see examples of what TinEye is capable of, have a look at their Cool Searches page.
Thought...
