Visual search engine might be photographer's new best friend

TORONTO, CANADA – A new visual search engine could help photographers keep track of their photographs whenever and wherever they appear on the internet, PC Pro reported this week.

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," Leila Boujnane, the CEO of TinEye, told the online magazine on Monday. "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."

And the technology is not dependent on the quality of the input image. According to Boujnane, anything you would consider a preview image or low resolution image would work. She added, “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."

TinEye may provide an entirely new way for image companies and amateur photographers to track how and where their images are being used, without the need for digital watermarks. Among many additional future features, the company is planning to launch an alerts service soon, which will notify a user when their photograph pops up on the net.

TinEye is currently in beta, with a focus on expanding an image index. The company claims the search engine could come out of beta as early as next month.