Who Took My Photo?

We recently discovered an impressive bit of internet technology, it is still in beta but working well. You may love this technology, or fear it, depending on your point of view. In essence, it is a search engine for images. This search engine allows you to search the entire internet for a specific photo or image, including minor modifications made to it like cropping, etc. Read the full text for the full story.

tineye.org , while currently still in beta, is functional and open to the general public. If you took a picture or photo, and you'd like to see if anyone else on the internet has used this photo on their site, simply search for it. This is a very powerful tool for the owners of photos and images as they now have a quick and effective way to scan the internet. Likewise, if you have images on your site that you have used without permission, there is a tool in place now that enables the owner to find out about it if they wanted to.

While there is more info availabe on their site, here is briefly how it works. You upload (or provide the url to) the image you want to find. Their engine reads the image, pixel by pixel, and creates sort of a mathematical "signature". It then compares your image's signature against its database and provides a list of the matches. Somehow, it even detects matches when some of the pixels have changed (edited in Photoshop) or if some of the pixels are gone (cropped or resized).

Their website has a nice video with more details...it's worth a quick look.