[HowTo] Do a Reverse Image Search in Chrome using TinEye

Visual depiction of information is a new trend that is prevalent in the web world since its introduction. More and more web content providers use visual aids to make their content more interesting and involving. Have you ever wanted to go to the roots of an image used in a website ? Do you want to know where it was first used ? Do you want to see the original image of a modified one ? TinEye browser extension for Chrome helps you do the same.

TinEye has come up with a plugin for Chrome with which you can find where all the image is used, the original version or versions of the same pic of higher resolution. TinEye claims to be the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in our index to retrieve matches. TinEye does not typically find similar images, it finds exact matches including those that have been cropped, edited or resized.

Lets me give a walkthrough of this Chrome extension using an example. A step by step approach follows.

Step 1: Search and Install the TinEye extesion from the Chrome Web Store.

Step 2: You can now find TinEye among the installed extensions on your Chrome Browser. Now right click on any image on a website that you wanted to check out and select the “Search Image on TinEye” option.

Step 3: This opens up the TinEye search results page in a new tab. The screenshots of my image search result is shown below.

Step 4: You can then navigate to the links in the search results. You can also make a comparison between the image on which you did a reverse search and the image that was returned as a result

You can also navigate to the plugins setting page by opening the extensions tab in the Chrome settings page and clicking on the options button below the TinEye extension. The options that come with this extension are shown below.

Overall TinEye reverse image search for Chrome is a very useful plugin. It has some very good uses such as searching for other usages of your copyrighted image on the web. Since it has options for search on right click on the browser image it saves you the trouble of pasting the URL of the image in the TinEye website.