TinEye Makes Reverse Image Search a Reality

TinEye is one of those things that gives you a, “Whoa.. this is the future” moment. In movies you’ve seen technology before where someone just takes a photo, scans it into a computer and it magically knows where the photo was taken. This is exactly what TinEye does.

The best example I can give of this is that someone on Reddit recently asked, “Hey, this is a cool place – where is it?” Someone responded, found out it was a Scottish castle and said they used TinEye to find it.

Seriously, how cool is that?

What makes TinEye very different from a regular search is that no keywords are used or anything like that in the way TinEye works. Upload a photo, wait a few seconds and see if TinEye comes up with anything. Chances are it will. TinEye has had contributions from major photo web sites such as Getty Images, iStockPhoto and several others, so the search will be extensive.

I can definitely see one of the major web companies (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, etc.) acquiring this tech in the future. Although I’m not one to usually make predictions, “Reverse Image Search”, as TinEye calls it, is definitely something that’s going to become a standard image search feature of the future.

Like what you read?

If so, please join over 28,000 people who receive our exclusive weekly newsletter and computer tips, and get FREE COPIES of 5 eBooks we created, as our gift to you for subscribing. Just enter your name and email below:

http://aaronfournier.50webs.com/ Aaron Fournier
A cool example of how using TinEye has helped me recognize something happened a few months ago. One of the sites I use had a giveaway where they showed a screenshot from a movie and asked where it came from. I made a copy of the screenshot and searched for it on TinEye and immediately found out what movie it came from. Truly helpful and definitely awesome. The Firefox extension is very useful to me. I use it all the time.