New Search Engine Helps Photographers Track Their Pictures

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Visual search engine is photographer's best friend
12:15PM, Monday 18th August 2008
A new visual search engine could help photographers keep track of their photographs whenever, and wherever, they appear on the internet.

The TinEye search engine, developed by Canadian company Idee, allows users to search by uploading a picture rather than typing in a keyword. It then conducts a pixel by pixel search across the internet, flagging up all instances of that image even if it's been cropped, merged or digitally altered in some way.

"TinEye does for images what Google does for text," says Leila Boujnane, the CEO of TinEye. "We are not limited by words, Google can only find an image if a particular search word is in proximity to it. We have the ability on a large scale to tell somebody where one of their images has appeared and how it's being used." [Full Article]

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TinEye is in private beta right now...you can sign up and cross your fingers for an invite here: http://tineye.com/login

Actually it's not all that private...no invite needed, I just signed up and I'm in. Will share the results shortly.

Okay, I've tried it with a couple of my images that I know are published on a few sites, and they couldn't find them. It seems their index is still very small...701 million images from the whole internet is nothing. I guess we'll have to wait awhile to see if it really works.