TinEye is a service provided by Idée Inc. that allows you to search for an image using an image. If you haven’t signed up for the service yet, you can go to the main TinEye site and watch a demonstration video.
TinEye works by creating a sort of “fingerprint” of the pixels in an image. Then by comparing the pixels in the image that you provide, it can cross reference it with their index. It will give you a list of sites that the image appears on, in addition to images that are similar to your image.
I did a TinEye search for the image I threw together for my Making an iPhone Friendly Website post. Check out the results here. Obviously, this exact image isn’t going to appear anywhere besides my site, so you immediate get an example of how it can find similar images.
If you click on one of the result thumbnails, you’ll get a popup window that will let you compare your image to the image TinEye found for you by clicking the “Toggle” button. It may not be readily evident in this example, but when you toggle the images, TinEye will anchor the parts of the image that are the same – in this example, the hand – so you can see what changes between the two.
The service works by uploading an image from your computer or by linking to an image on the web. To extend its functionality, there are plugins for Firefox and Internet Explorer, as well as bookmarklets for other browsers like Opera and Safari. The Internet Explorer and Firefox addons all you to right-click an image anywhere on the web and do a TinEye search for it in a new background tab.
Right now, some more obscure images may not produce any results; a few of the images on this site got zero results. TinEye has just a shade over 1 billion images indexed, which is actually a very small portion of all the images on the internet. Nonetheless, it’s an amazing service that will only get better with time.
I love tech, but don’t have as much time or money to spend on it as I’d like. I get what I need to sustain my Geek vicariously through other sources and pass it along to you.
