New visual search engine TinEye could be a major breakthrough for photographers

Posted August 19, 2008 at 11:28 PM by Jodie Andrefski

Section: Computers, Software / Applications, Imaging, Web

Developed by the Canadian company Idee, the TinEye search engine is a fantastic new breakthrough in the realm of search engines that allows users to search for their photographs anywhere on the Internet.  Users are able to actually search for a picture by uploading it, and then having the program run a pixel by pixel search across the ‘Net. All found instances of the image are flagged, regardless of whether it has been cropped, merged or digitally altered in any way.

Leila Boujnane, CEO of TinEye, has the following to say about their program.

“TinEye does for images what Google does for text. 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.“

The program is also not limited by the quality of the input image according to Boujnane.  She states that “anything you would consider a preview image or low resolution image would work. I can take a photograph of a picture in the Louvre with my mobile and upload it to TinEye and it would dump me on the page of that Wikipedia page related to that painting.“

It doesn’t come as much of a shock that she thinks that TinEye can offer a totally new way for companies and photographers to keep track of where and how their images are being used without the use of a digital watermark. The company is even starting an alerts service which immediately lets a user know when their photograph shows up on the ‘Net, and even allows a batch search tool.  As a photographer myself, I can easily see the ways that this service can be very appreciated. I’ve seen photographs of mine lifted and used on newspapers and publications over in other countries, and those I only found by chance.

However, Boujnane points out that the program’s usefulness is not merely limited to just copyright enforcement. “It’s being used by researchers who need to find where an image came from to provide attribution, even people who are trying to find out who people are in old photos,“ she says. “We had somebody who had a photograph of a soldier who’d arrived on the beach at Normandy and they couldn’t find their name. They did a whole bunch of searches on TinEye and found a tiny little photo on an American website that listed everybody who’d gone to Normandy with a photograph. That’s exactly when TinEye is useful, when you have an image but no words.“

Currently in beta, scheduled to come out as early as September, TinEye offers a focus on expanding an image index which currently stands at “several hundred million”, a number growing by a “few hundred million per month.“  You can find out more here in the meantime. Definitely a program that just may be worth keeping an Eye on.

Via [PCPro]