Yes, it’s true!

When I opened my iGoogle browser homepage at a most ungodly hour of the morning, I saw a Digg/Design link waiting patiently for my attention.  A couple of clicks later, and I am staring at a most curious, most interesting, most potentially geeky-cool little web application.  From a little poking around, it looks like this little gem is nice and simple, pleasingly stripped down to a good, minimal design interface and, most importantly..?  It’s free!

Meet TinEye.  Tineye is “a reverse image search engine”. A reserve doowuhuh, you say?  Chew on this.  The premise is a simple one:  Tineye allows you to upload an image, run what is basically a reverse lookup on said image and end up with some potentially very handy dandy little information about the image, such as the following:

• From where the image originated
• Where and how it is being used
• If there are modified versions available
• If there are higher resolution versions available

Can you imagine?  If this darling little web app works anywhere near the way it claims to, I could see this being a very useful application for designers like me, artists and photographers being able to make great use of the app doing occasional reverse lookups on their own images!  In this day and age when so many folks on the internet are still either largely ignorant about copyright laws as they relate to the use of “found” images or, just as likely, are quite informed indeed and simply don’t care or don’t think they will ever be one of the ones to get caught or targeted for legal action, Tineye can at least provide some form of tracking assistance in the struggle to maintain some sense of creative control over artists’ original works.

Of course, there is always the flipside, the side which Tineye itself appears to mostly focus upon and one which can also be quite helpful indeed.  Imagine you find an image on your harddrive which you saved a few weeks ago to use for an upcoming piece of artwork or design goodness.  One problem:  That was a few weeks ago.  Now you need to find out some information about said image and, silly you, you forgot to jot down a little note about the URL source and terms.  Or, for another example, you found a stock photo comp image, forgot to make a note about where you found it or, more importantly, where the higher-res version resides, and now you want to track down the image and get the higher resolution version for your work.

Tineye claims to help take a good chunk out of the tedious, time consuming, terrible search process.  Create an account, upload your image, let Tineye process the image and create a “digital fingerprint” of it after which it searches its database of all processed images (allegedly 1,013,140,121 images at the time of this writing) to find exact matches, regardless of whether the image has been cropped, edited or resized.  No “similar” matches here; Tineye claims to only return exact matches, thanks to its digital signature scanning technology.

So what happens to the images you upload to Tineye? Do they become a part of the database?  No, not so, says Tineye.  According to the FAQ, uploaded images are not added to the search index and are not ever made publicly accessible to other users of the service.  Your upload creates a “permalink” to your image where you can access it again in the future for search purposes, but the FAQ also states that the images you upload can also be completely removed from the site after 48 hours simply by visiting your profile and opting to do so.

The site contains a little bit of information about how it crawls the web to aquire and process the images in its database, how to forbid the service to crawl your own sites and how to suggest a site for the service to crawl.  Tineye also has developed a plugin for Internet Explorer and Firefox that enables you to use the service, from your browser, on any website on which you are currently browsing, and they also include a bookmarklet for other browsers besides these two.

I plan on signing up for the service very soon (actually probably after I’ve had a little bit of sleep finally) and giving it a spin to see how well it works.  In the meantime, if any of you have already tried the service, or are about to give it a go, how about leaving a comment below and let me know about your experiences?  Is it really as easy to use as it looks?  Are you able to find any exact matches with your sample searches?  Do you get any results for “similar” material instead of “exact”?  Any weird behaviour, potential bugs or malfunctions?

This looks like a fantastic service!  I can’t wait to give it a spin.  I have a good feeling about my own experiences with it, and as soon as I have had the time to review the service more in-depth, I will be sure to post the results here for others to digest and compare.

As always, bountiful blessings to you and yours… and stay crafty!

-Jessie

Storykraft Kreative