Ever wonder if any of your images are online, be it pilfered from you or being used with permission. I ran across a very cool search engine which aspires to be the Google for images. You simply give it the URL of the image or, even easier, right click on any internet image after installing a Firefox plug-in and the site searches for the image, or even a portion of the image, in cyberspace.
Here is the link.
A few downsides:
1) At this point in time only a small fraction of the images 'out there' are cataloged and searched.....about 500 million of them.
2) It is still in beta.
3) To try to use it you need to apply for an invitation. The good news is that I got mine via e-mail in about 10 minutes.
4) It didn't find my images on various critique sites where I know they reside.
But within limits it does work. If you go to a microstock site, where images are meant to be purchased for use, and search on a popular image it will return hits where the image has been used, even when the image has been cropped down etc.
Try it for some of your own on-line images. You might be surprised what you find, for better or worse!
May 18, 2008
Find Your Images On-Line
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5 comments:
Thanks for the info Howard I will definitely give it a try !!
Sounds interesting Howard. If you are giving them your image URL - is it just looking up references to it? If so, how would that be different than say looking at your website stats for attempts to hotlink? I guess I am just not sure how it would work if say someone copies and image, changes the filename or even goes as far as to erasing metadata.
Mark, I don't understand exactly how it works, but you can upload an image to it that is not on the web and have it find that image used on the web...ie its source image need not have a URL, but can reside on your hard drive and you upload it to let tineye 'see it'. It apparently doesn't use the filename or metadata in the search, but looks for 'patterns'. From its info page:
TinEye uses sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms to find your image on the web without the use of metadata or watermarks.
"TinEye instantly analyzes your query image to create a compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it. TinEye searches for your image on the web by comparing its fingerprint to the fingerprint of every single other image in the TinEye search index."
Not sure exactly what it does but it sounds more complex than just looking up references to a URL.
Seems pretty interesting.
I signed up for a beta notification, but apparently they are full up right now.
Thanks for the tip to this site. With a little luck they'll let me in with an account.
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