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Post details: Stealing images now much harder, thanks to tineye

07/20/2010

Stealing images now much harder, thanks to tineye

Did you ever experience this? One of your pictures, that you bought from an image agency or that you made by yourself will show up on other people's websites? If they just link directly to your image, you can find out by checking your web-server log-files. But what if somebody made a copy of it and maybe even changed it?

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Here comes a useful service: tineye.com provides a perfect tool to find these images on the internet. For private use you can find them using two options. You can upload a picture from your computer or you can copy an image URL into the text field. Searching is amazingly fast and tineye even finds pictures that have been changed dramatically but are still based on the original. You can find their numbers on the website and according to their information, they have currently 1.6 billion pictures in their index, still counting.

Unfortunately, this will also give lawyers a new tool to find stolen images, so it may be bad news for people who don't check the licenses of their published images very thoroughly. For professional search, there is also a paid API to automate these search tasks. The price is $300 for 5,000 searches or $1,500 for 30,000 searches. It's easy for an experienced web developer to use the API to create an easy to use and comfortable software (I have done similar applications using similar APIs already).

If you want to use it comfortably for your own private use, you can download a plugin for Firefox or Chrome from the tineye homepage. With the plugin you just need to right-click an image on any page to start the search in the tineye database.

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While I tested this service, it sometimes came back with an error page, maybe because they receive too many requests sometimes. Waiting a few minutes and trying again usually fixed the problem.

At last a useful tip for all, who want to make sure that they don't use a copyrighted image accidentally. You can sometimes read of cases like this: A web-designer used a "free" photo from a free download site and got sued because the photo was not free to use. Sometimes these images can be uploaded inadvertently to these download sites. Tineye can help here. Just check the pictures that you want to use. If you see that it shows up at a professional picture agency like istockphoto.com, then better don't use it. Such a search don't give you one hundred percent safety, but since all big agencies will add their material to the database, your chance is getting better over time that you may find something.

If you like ego-searching, tineye is a perfect tool for that too. If you want to know, where your face will show up on the internet, you can find out quick and easily.

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