- TinEye index
Last week we added 28 million images to TinEye and today we topped that by adding 47 million images. The TinEye index is growing and we have more exciting news coming very soon. Happy searching!
- TinEye now accepting image collection submissions
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!
- Photoshelter partners with TinEye
What happens when you mix two really great things together? Generally, something super-great.And that’s why the TinEye team is excited to announce our partnership with the good folks over at Photoshelter, a leader in portfolio websites, photo sales and archiving tools for photographers.
In a couple of weeks, we’ll be adding the entire Photoshelter image collection to the TinEye search index, making it easy for TinEyers to find Photoshelter photographers as well as identify them as the original author of an image. Plus we’ll be keeping up to date by adding any new Photoshelter images to the TinEye index as they are introduced. Pretty neat, eh?
Check out Photoshelter’s TinEye announcement on their website, and stay tuned to TinEye for some lovely Photoshelter images coming soon!
Update: Check out Photoshelter’s recent blog post, explaining the partnership in more detail.
- Expanding our TinEye index
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.
- TinEye Maintenance
TinEye will be going off line at 15:00 today for 2 hours. Maintenance time! Head to our multicolor lab for some fun searching in the meantime.
- Share TinEye search results with friends
Question: When you happen upon some really great TinEye search results, what do you do? Well you can selfishly keep that precious gem all to yourself (Scrooge), or you can spread the wealth!
We’ve just made it dead simple to share interesting TinEye search results with the internets. Click or hover over our new ‘Share’ button and pick your poison: Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Digg, email or your blog… admit it, you’re a social media butterfly.
- Save precious time: TinEye Mozilla add-on and plugins! <3
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!
- Open TinEye! And other stuff…
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!
- 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?!
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- TinEye: down and up!
TinEye is down for a bit of maintenance. TinEye is getting a 1 billion image index and he will be back shortly after his oil change. Stay tuned. We expect to bring him back online this evening. In the meantime if you have never visited the Idée labs, this is your chance to play with in the multicolr lab where you can search 10 million creative commons images by multicolour. Stay tuned!
- TinEye: now searching 900 million images!
That’s right folks, we just added another 200 million images to TinEye (give or take a few million). Now you can search over 900,000,000 images in real time, comparing any image against our index of almost one billion images crawled from the web.
What does this mean for you, TinEye searcher? More matches!
Let’s try out a few example searches using the same images I used in an earlier blog post. Just a little over a month ago (when the index was a tad over 700 million images) we took a look at some well known pictures from across the web to see how many of them TinEye could find. Now we can try those searches again to see what kind of results will we get after adding almost a quarter of a billion more images to the index.
For starters, let’s try Gerard Butler and his well know shot from the movie 300. Originally we found 526 results, with our bigger index TinEye locates 672 results with some interesting new edits. Try the TinEye search.
The very popular Creation of Adam came in at 635 results last time. Now? 756. Try the TinEye search.
Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez was also a popular image, coming in at 277 results. With our updated index of over 901 million images, the Las Meninas search turns up 313 results now. Try the TinEye search.
To learn more about TinEye, the world’s first image search engine, you can read the TinEye FAQ or head over to TinEye.com and register your account to start searching right away. Don’t forget to let us know what you think.
Happy searching!
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