Reverse Image Search - TinEye

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Truffles

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Apr 20, 2009
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So while looking for images to use with some ads I came across people bitching that, well, people were using their images in their ads.

Low and behold someone recommends TinEye.com. WTF is TinEye you ask?

It is like Google Images, but in reverse. You upload a photo or paste in a URL and hit search. It then cross-references the image against its database and shows you links and thumbs for not just where that exact image appears, but also modified versions, different sizes, etc.

And they don't go off of filename or meta data. They are comparing the actual fucking images with their recognition algorithm. Pretty fucking cool, but also good to be aware of for those of you out there who have big money sites and have been too fucking cheap to license some stock photography.

Anyway, this is probably old news but new for me and probably some others out there.
 


I've read - probably here - that TinEye won't catch it if you flip the picture horizontally (mirror image) and using that version instead.

Unsure if big players like Getty factor in stuff like that when they troll for potential lawsuits/penalty fees.
 
tineye isn't that great, I suspect getty have their own inhouse solution and is much better at detecting images.,

I hear dof some dude who got sued becasue he used a tiny 80*100 crop of a getty image without license on a poster. Tineye has no clue how to detect that. and can only lookup images that are whole.
 
TigerUK said:
tineye isn't that great, I suspect getty have their own inhouse solution and is much better at detecting images.,

I hear dof some dude who got sued becasue he used a tiny 80*100 crop of a getty image without license on a poster. Tineye has no clue how to detect that. and can only lookup images that are whole.
Click to expand...

He was probably sent a bill from Getty. The good ol extortion scam they've had going for a while now.

They would never sue but most legit businesses pay anyway.
 
TigerUK said:
Tineye has no clue how to detect that. and can only lookup images that are whole.
Click to expand...

That's not entirely accurate. I had a header done which was a composite of three images, and tineye found one of them on a stock photo site even though the image in the header was only a small portion of the original.
 
TinEye is great, it just needs a much bigger index. I'm surprised they haven't been bought out yet.

A number of my photographer friends used tineye and found some sort of non-authorized commercial usage of their work. These can be easily settled for $500-$1000 if the culprit is a small/medium US firm. Less luck in EU or anywhere else.
 
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