Attention iPhone, Blackberry and smartphone junkies! Did you know that you can easily use TinEye to search for images you come across while browsing the web on your phone? Yep, all you need to do is install the TinEye bookmarklet. A bookmarklet is a little script that can be saved as an ordinary bookmark. The TinEye bookmarklet scrapes all of the images from the page you are viewing and sends them to TinEye.

Below is a little walk-through on how to install and use the TinEye bookmarklet on a mobile device, using the iPhone as an example.

Installing the TinEye bookmarklet

The easiest way to install the bookmarklet on your phone, is to add it to your PC/Mac bookmarks first, and then sync your bookmarks to your mobile device. Bear with me, you will only have to do this once!

Start at the TinEye bookmarklet page. Add the bookmarklet by right-clicking the grey ‘TinEye Images’ button and selecting ‘Bookmark This Link’ or ‘Add to Favorites’. In Safari you can just drag the button into your bookmarks toolbar as below:

Here you can see that the bookmarklet has been successfully added to my browser’s bookmarks. It shows up as ‘TinEye images’:

Now sync your PC/Mac bookmarks to your mobile device using the sync software for your smartphone. For the iPhone, this is easily done in iTunes from the ‘Info’ tab for your device. You may sync your bookmarks independently of other data (contacts, music, email, etc.).

I’ve complete the sync, and the TinEye bookmarklet is now showing up in the Safari Bookmarks Bar on my iPhone. Success! Installation complete:

Using the TinEye bookmarklet

Now for the easy part. Using the TinEye bookmarklet is super-simple. Just browse over to a web page containing some images you would like to search. I’ll use the Picasso entry on Wikipedia as an example:

To search for any images on this page, just open up the bookmarks on your mobile device and select the TinEye Images bookmarklet. On the iPhone, your bookmarks are accessed using the icon circled in the screenshot above.

Once you select the TinEye images bookmarklet, all the images on the page you were just viewing will be scraped and sent to TinEye. To search for an image, just select the one you want and view your results:

Fun, no? Once you have your TinEye results you can sort them by size or closest match just as you normally would. See what sorts of interesting results you can find when you’re on the go with TinEye!

TinEye Mobile is now available for download on the iphone App store! We submitted TinEye Mobile to Apple a few days after our beta testing (thanks folks for helping us beta test) and got our application approval late last week. We have been so busy that we almost forgot to tell you all!

If you are not familiar with TinEye Mobile here is a little video. Basically TinEye Mobile allows you to search for music using a mobile phone camera: snap a photo and get information about the music CD or track you are interested in. It is that simple.

In this first release we don’t just get results back from itunes, but we also get you any information about the CD or track you are searching from YouTube, allmusic and wikipedia. So happy music searching. We would of course love your feedback and requests. But before you can do that, you will need to go download the App!

As we mentioned last week, the sleeveface contest at the idéeplex during our TinEye Music beta release party was a ton of fun. Now it’s time to select the winners of our sleeveface-off.

To // Sleeveface // : one or more persons obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion.

Here’s the official “How to Sleeveface” video:

As we told our friends at the iParty, the best of the sleeveface snapshots will win a prize.  Jen Dodd clearly pulled off a winning sleeveface with her Nina Hagen look below, so she’s queued up for a prize for sure.

Who else do you think deserves a little something for their sleevefacing efforts? Leave us your comments with your top two picks from the photos below and we’ll tally up the votes and award two more prizes.

Okay, so those are our contestants for the prizes.  But wait! I have a few more snaps for you – here are the idéalists avoiding work on a Friday afternoon by sleevefacing:

If you are diggin’ the sleeveface you can see more on Flickr and Facebook. Even fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld is into sleeveface (kind of anyway).

Happy sleevefacing friends! If you try it out remember to post a link to your photos in the comments, we’d love to see them.

Last night we hosted a little event here at the idéeplex to share the latest toy we are working on.  We were lucky to have a great group of folks from the Toronto tech community join us to ‘kick the tires’ of our soon-to-be-released beta app for iPhone.

Thanks to everyone who came by and made the night a smashing success. It was really exciting for the team here at Idée to see TinEye Music, the first iPhone application of our visual search technology, out the door for beta testing.

With TinEye Music you use your iPhone to take a photo of any album cover. Almost instantly that snapshot gets compared to our index of over a million album covers and the app sends you right to the iTunes page for that artist where you can preview songs, buy tracks or even purchase the entire album right from your iPhone.

You can learn more about our app by watching our quick little video or reading today’s posts by Mathew Ingram and Adam Schwabe.  Jevon from StartupNorth beat all of us all to the punch, however, with his TinEye Music review posted during the party.

On top of the great conversations and lots of music searching with our TinEye iPhone app, we also did a little “sleevefacing” last night. If you aren’t familiar with the term “sleeveface“, take a look at some of our guests demonstrating it here and here.  Amber MacArthur channelled her inner J.Lo, Libin Pan did his best Steve Jobs pose and Jen Dodd rocked on as Nina Hagen (Jen, you win sleeveface of the night, we’ll send you your prize!). It was a lively night for all.

We have a ton of photos to share. For even more, Ben Lucier has shots of the party over on Flickr and photographer Rannie Turingan posted lots of great pics too.

This photo Rannie took of Jevon performing “the TinEye maneuver” with his iPhone is one of my favourites, followed closely by Alice’s snapshot of the other Beta at the party last night.

Well, the fun might be over but the work is not. This is just the beginning of bringing visual search to the world of mobile technology and we have a lot more in store for you, stay tuned!

** Photo: Jevon strikes a pose – Rannie Turingan

What could possibly have us more excited than the release of our image search engine TinEye 4 months ago? It’s our killer new TinEye Mobile application.

The idea is very simple: Using our TinEye Mobile application installed on your smartphone take a photograph of a product (a CD, DVD, book or game etc.) you would like more information about,  we’ll identify the item using our image recognition algorithms and then send you on to read reviews, sample music or do price comparisons.

Let’s take a real example: our first mobile release is TinEye Music. This is mobile searching for music on your iPhone. Take a photograph of an album cover and we will compare your image to over a million album covers we have indexed and send you to the iTunes page where you can preview or buy the songs from the album. TinEye Music will be released shorty – pending QA and App Store approval – but you get the idea! And all of this is done using our image recognition technology. No typing, no barcodes. Shoot and search.

I made a little video, very rough but that should give you an idea of what we are talking about!