Austin Kleon, author of Newspaper Blackout and curator of one of the most interesting tags on Tumblr
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Austin Kleon, author of Newspaper Blackout and curator of one of the most interesting tags on Tumblr, recently posted a link to this helpful chart, designed by Pia Jane Bijkerk and Erin Loechner, on whether or not to post an image to the internet.
The chart suggests Evernote as a way to manage images you’ve found online, which is obviously advice we can get behind.
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It also recommends a service I’d never heard of called TinEye, which is a reverse search engine. Unlike Google Images, Flickr’s search page (prior post), or a service such as Wylio (prior post), which allow you to search for photos based on keywords or tags, TinEye tries to find the actual image itself. The site even asserts that it can find cropped or modified versions of an image on the web. Here’s a demonstration of how it works:
I suspect the main use-case for TinEye is for people looking to police their copyrighted images, but it is, as Pia Jane Bijkerk and Erin Loechner suggest, potentially useful for helping to discover the source of images you’d like to use, or are otherwise interested in research. The site offers a bookmarklet that’s compatible with the various browsers.
The limitation of the site is that its database is still pretty small. TinEye asserts that there are nearly 2 billion images in its database, which sounds awesome until you remember that Flickr alone has more than 4 billion. I tried using the service with some of the images we’ve used at ProfHacker, and came up empty. Then I tried using some of the publicity stills for Star Wars: The Clone Wars that I keep at Flickr. TinEye did a little better here: It found matches for the images from Seasons 1 and 2, although not all of the current season--and while it found some matches, it definitely didn’t find all the instances of these pictures online.
To some extent, TinEye reminds me of Samuel Johnson’s notorious comments about a walking dog: Although the results aren’t great (yet), it’s amazing that it works at all. The people who make TinEye, idée labs, have a variety of other experimental image-search options to play with, too.
Do you have a better reverse-image search solution? Let us know in comments!
Photo by Flickr user robynneblume / Creative Commons licensed
