TinEye

TinEye is a search engine that lets you find where a particular image has been used on the web. I know you’re probably thinking, “Duh! I can use Google image search for that!” But TinEye is a entirely different kind of beast. While Google image search uses text to search for associated images, TinEye uses an image as a query for searching. Google can’t do that — at least, not yet.

Similar to how Google indexes all the web pages it crawls, TinEye creates a digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ of the images using sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms. Once you query using an image, TinEye instantly analyzes and compares the ‘fingerprint’ of your query image with the images in its search index. TinEye also can pull up the modified versions of the image, as long as the images are alterations of the same query image.

The thing is, TinEye doesn’t actually see the image, in the sense that if you upload the image of a dog, it doesn’t see it as a ‘dog’ and fetches you images of other dogs. It only finds the location where the same image has been used, even if altered or modified. TinEye orders the results by most similarities, meaning that altered images are found towards the end of the search.

To search using TinEye, you can either enter a URL to a image on the web or upload an image from your computer. Another way is to install the TinEye browser plugin for Firefox or Internet Explorer. With the plugin installed, you can right click on any web image to search for it using TinEye.

Visit TinEye for more information or to begin your search!