TinEye, A Useful Tool For Photographers

It Started Out With Looking For An Image

I was recently wondering whether an image I saw used on a blogging site, was in fact, lifted from a popular stock photo agency site's online preview gallery. After some random browsing keywords on the stock photo agency site, I remebered reading about image based searching. Googling for image based searching yielded me the name and site of the company I had heard about: TinEye.

How Does It Work?

Well, put simply, given a small sample image, TinEye will then use their image search algorithms to locate similar images that are available online. Since the stock photo agency in question allows web crawlers to index and cache their images, this made the search painless.

1. Go to the blog post in question and download the suspected image.
2. Go to TinEye.com's website to perform your search.
3. Upload the suspect image to TinEye's search engine.
4. Get a list of potential matches.

In the case of the image, it came back with one and only one resulting image, an image from the stock agency. I emailed the blogger about this and it seems the issue has been resolved. As the case usually goes, there is no reason to name names.

I was mightily impressed and after lookinga at the TinEye website some more, it appears they have commercial services and API(s) for automated batch image searching. Very cool.

Potential Uses: Copyright Infringement Searches

By and large, this seems to be their money maker demographic. It allows individuals and groups, to search for copyright violations without having to wad through the morass that is keyword spam. The algorithm looks like it is sophisticated enough to weed out non-matches.

Potential Uses: Potential Clients Looking For Your Work

Sometimes, people will see your work in use or display somewhere. Take a photo of it, but can't for the life of them, remember your name or contact information when they've decided that a nice framed print of your image is what they want in their living room. TinEye's service greatly enhances potential clients' ability to locate and find your works, or find your works if they are of a similar nature to another piece. Ie, they submit an image of a dog photograph and you photograph dogs. Your images may come up!

Potential Uses: Seeking Inspiration

Sometimes, you hit a dry spell. You're shooting, but you're not inspired. It is the visual dulldrums. Take an image of some subject you are interested in, upload it to TinEye, and see what other images there are! You might find your muse knocking once again.