You asked for it, and we are happy to deliver. The TinEye extension for Chrome is now live, and ready to make your searching a little easier.

Instructions for installing the extension can be found on our plugins page, or you can just jump right over to the Chrome Extensions site and click ‘Install’. It’s that easy! While you’re there, be sure to check out our how-to video on YouTube (or watch it below).

This extension works for Windows and Linux. Once Chrome supports it, a Mac version will be coming soon. Also, Chrome currently does not support right-clicking so the present extension behaves similar to our TinEye bookmarklet (but much nicer!). We’ll be updating the functionality once right-clicking is made available.

Enjoy!

TinEye has just one goal in life: To connect images and information. Whether that means finding the original author of an image, finding out where an image has been used on the web, or finding out more information about an image in general, TinEye wants to help you find the information you’re looking for. And the bigger our database of images, the better!

We have been crawling the web relentlessly over the past several months. In October ’09 we grew by 21.5 million images. In November we grew by 22.5 million images. In December we leaped up another 65 million images.  And in January alone we’ve added 44 million images and the month is not over yet!

In addition to our regular web crawling, we have started adding entire specialized image collections. Last week we announced the addition of the iStockphoto and Photoshelter stock photo collections to TinEye. Why? Because we want to make it easy to attribute any stock image to its original author, and facilitate sales. And we plan to add new and different specialized image collections over the coming weeks and months. Maybe even yours?

So… calling all companies dealing with large image collections on the web! TinEye is officially accepting your image collection submissions. Here are some of the things we are looking for:

• Stock and editorial photography collections
• Art and illustration collections
• Product image indexes and catalogs
• Archival or historical image collections
• You tell us!

If you are an image provider or deal with large image collections as a part of your business–and if you want more people connecting with your images–then we want to hear from you! Preference will be given to collections containing over 1 million images, and to companies with an existing image management and delivery procedure.

To add your image collection to TinEye, please contact us. Help us connect your images to you!

(Photo by Kjunstorm)

We are happy to announce that TinEye our reverse image search engine has grown its index again adding over 32 million images including the entire iStockphoto and Photoshelter image collections. This is great news for photographers, image buyers and anyone interested in copyright compliance and attribution.

Today the TinEye index sits at just over 1.2 billion images – yes, that’s billion not million – 1,267,565,027 to be exact. As we grow we have been looking at how to answer just one question:

• who created that image?

Why is this important? Simple: Attribution. Creators want to establish authorship of their work and also know where their images are used. TinEye facilitates both.

As TinEye’s index grew, TinEye became the defacto image registry. Every day TinEye answers the “who created that image” question and connects images to their source. TinEye does this without keywords or metadata. Simply use an image to find an image. This is what we like to call the beginning of the attribution movement.

To start we are adding the world’s stock photography images to TinEye to connect all images available for licensing to their creator and distributor. And that’s just the beginning.

Every day TinEye helps image authors by:

• linking images to the original author – this is about attribution
• allowing image buyers to find the proper distributor of an image to purchase it
• showing how and where images are being used on the web
• protecting against image theft

Maybe you are a designer and you’d like to purchase an image for a project and you have a thumbnail or comp image but you’re not sure where it came from. Maybe you’re in love with a certain awesome image and would like to see the author’s other work. Maybe you want to see who else on the web is using an image… maybe you’re the image author. It does not matter: TinEye connects the dots for you.

At TinEye, we want to index every image in the world to help you find what you are looking for. iStockphoto and Photoshelter are a pretty awesome step towards that but it does not stop there. We will be adding a series of stock photography collections in the coming weeks so please stay tuned. If you are interested in having your image collection added to TinEye, get in touch.

Start using TinEye or join the 500,000 people who dowloaded our TinEye Firefox add-on to make image searching a single click.

What you make is important

We thought enabling you to search for an image using an images was the apogée of search. The nec plus ultra, the ultimate … well you get my drift. Using TinEye you still had to upload an image or feed TinEye a URL. For those of you still unfamiliar with TinEye (how is that possible?):

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. For some real TinEye search examples, check out our Cool Searches page.

So to make life even easier for you, we created a series of TinEye plugins. And it looks like you guys just totally love our TinEye Firefox plugin: we surpassed 250,000 downloads, and that’s only since we started counting! My team tells me that we are way way beyond that. But hey, we are sticking to the public numbers! And as of this post they are actually getting closer to 300,000 downloads!

And boy this also makes us a top download!

Thanks for spreading the word about the TinEye Firefox plugin. Help us reach the ONE MILLION download! That’s a milestone we are going to celebrate in the ideeplex! Thanks for helping out get the word out:

@shanselman

@JazMinderr

and everyone who keeps tweeting about TinEye.

Since the launch of TinEye, we have had a great response from the Wikimedia Commons image community. Wikimedia Commons is a repository of free-content files, including images, that are either in the public domain or released under free licenses. These images are used in many of the Wikimedia Foundation’s projects, including Wikipedia.

Anyone can contribute to Wikimedia Commons, and the project is driven by volunteers; while they are careful to respect image copyright, researching the license for each image that is submitted can be a challenge. To aid in this effort, members of Wikimedia Commons have created automated plugins and image checkers driven by the TinEye search engine, to help research photos and locate the source of images.

For an interesting browse, check out Wikimedia Commons member Shizhao’s TinEye bot, which allows you to see all of the interesting images that have been uploaded to the Commons and been detected elsewhere on the web by TinEye.

Young TinEye is experiencing a growth spurt as of late, and he doesn’t show any signs of stopping. He must be eating his Wheaties.

We have been working away on our crawling approaches and our efforts are finally bearing fruit. For the past several weeks the TinEye image index has grown by roughly 2-3 million images per week using a series of new crawling approaches. This is a good foundation that we are now going to scale to bring you more images and current content!

You may not have noticed this since our TinEye results page rounds our image index to the nearest hundredth of a billion images (i.e. the nearest 10 million). But we’ve changed it to round to the nearest 100 thousand images so now it is easy to watch that number grow!

The expansion of our image index also means you will be seeing increasingly current content in your search results from blogs and other online publications.

So check back often and keep searching! Stay tuned for further developments as well as the ability to submit your sitemaps directly to TinEye.

That’s a word I have never used!

Fantasticism Fan*tas”ti*cism\, n. The quality of being fantastical; fancifulness; whimsicality.

Well, that’s how Garrett describes our Multicolr Lab!

Well it is about time that the Google folks mimicked the Canadian search giants – yes, that’s us! Google introduced colour search to image searching. Nice. Of course it will be awesome! Still no multicolour on Google but you can try a simple hack to get the poor man’s multicolour on Google: search for a colour using a keyword (for example blue sky) and pick a different colour from the drop down. Voila! No great image search results but hey it is a start…

Now if you want the play with the real deal in multicolour searching head over to the Idée lab!

Love how a blog post on LifeHacker about Google’s colour search moves into a full discussion of Idée’s technologies namely: TinEye and Multicolor search. Fun times in the Ideeplex!

Click, BAM. Click, BAM. No, that’s not a grenade–that’s just the peaceful sound of the TinEye plugin providing you with instant search satisfaction! If you are running Firefox or Internet Explorer and you have not installed the TinEye plugin, you don’t know what you’re missing. Just right-click on any image from wherever you happen to be on the intertubes, and TinEye will quickly and quietly search for that image in a background tab or separate window.

Firefox users update: we’ve just released version 0.5 of our plugin. It is now out of the sandbox and available directly from Mozilla! If you’ve already tried out the FF version, why not write us a review?

Oh, and for our Opera and Safari friends: Sorry we do not have a special plugin just for you, but we do have a really great bookmarklet that is the next best thing.

Happy Friday!

Well folks we’ve heard you loud and clear: “We don’t want to log in to use TinEye“. Good news! TinEye is now open for anyone and everyone to use, without the need to log in or register. Our registered friends – and there are almost 200,000 of you – however, will enjoy some great perks.

And there have been some other changes too!

1. Registered users of TinEye will get the opportunity to try out new features first, and provide feedback. You will also be able to link to and share your search results with friends. You will also have the option to keep a search history, including a gallery of images with search dates and the number of results found. And don’t forget that registered users can subscribe to the TinEye newsletter to stay in the loop. Now would you just go and register?!
2. We introduced automatic discard of search images after one hour. If you are unregistered–or if you are registered and have disabled search history in your profile–anything you upload to TinEye for search is discarded after an hour.
3. We updated the TinEye plugin for FireFox to version 0.5. This update includes a bug fix where if text is highlighted with a background image beneath it, the plugin is not activated.
4. The little business of ads appearing on TinEye. Well, they have arrived because little TinEye wants some fluids (especially Robot Oil and Bourbon). You want a free reverse image search engine right?
5. We made improvements to search speed and you should be able to play with a faster and sharper TinEye.

Just for the new folks: TinEye is still only searching a 1 billion image index which means if you don’t find a match for your image search it is not the image recognition technology, it is the index! But now that we have this release out the door we will go back to working on the little things: like growing our index!

We appreciate your feedback so keep the kudos and love coming.

So what should you be searching for this morning? Well how about the Obama Hope image that is all the rage this morning? or the little angry baby? Happy searching folks and welcome to the future of image search brought to you by the good folks at Idée.