Search Images with TinEye

Images make up a large percentage of the web’s content, but without reliable metadata regarding these images, it can be difficult to search for them. TinEye aims to address this problem through its innovative “reverse image search”. This allows you to find an image’s source, other websites that are using it, different sizes and resolutions and even modified versions of the image.

TinEye’s innovative approach to image searching makes it a very useful tool. To search, you simply upload an image file from you computer (which can be a JPEG, GIF or PNG file up to a size of 20 megabytes), drag and drop an image onto the TinEye page or input the URL of an image. Any of these approaches will quickly return a list of images that match the search image. These results can then be sorted by Best Match, Most Changed or Biggest Image, making it easy to find the version that most suits your needs. TinEye users can also install a browser plugin in any browser, including those on mobile devices, to be able to simply click on an image and immediately search it using the TinEye service, which saves the step of navigating to TinEye’s homepage. While the video below is a bit outdated, it provides a good overview of how TinEye works:

TinEye also offers several APIs that allow web developers to make use of the TinEye technology to integrate TinEye into their applications, search through their images based on color and identify duplicate images in their collections, to name just a few options.

TinEye is a fun and easy-to-use tool that is great for those who frequently work with images on the web or those who want to be able to quickly answer questions about web images. It can be used to properly identify and attribute images, to find different sizes or resolutions of a particular image or to see how an image has been modified across the web. If you use images on the web, it is worth the time to learn how to use TinEye.