- TinEye is back
Well folks TinEye is back online, thanks to S3 being back. Ouch. How is that for a poke in the TinEye. Sorry about the interruption, searching resumes now.
- TinEye private investigator
John Arrington’s review of TinEye just landed in my inbox forwarded by a colleague and that would have been just an awesome read if I had not woken up this morning to TinEye being down! We are in the office, getting rolling on bringing it back, the team is being hawled out of bed as we speak (happy Sunday!). There is no rest for the wicked! This is the first down time we have experienced so I am sure we will learn a few things. We will keep you posted as things progress.
I am sorry that John’s searches were successful in unearthing a couple of copyright violations but I am happy that he finally had a chance to play with it and his thumbs up in the form of this compliment: “All around impressive” keeps us warm as we battle the server gremlins.
- TinEye Feature: Favicons
Our Ryan has a post up about favicons in TinEye. Before the implementation of the favicons on TinEye it was kind of painful to keep track of the searches that you did, and if you are like us you are doing a lot of searches on TinEye, opening new tabs all the time and you end up with say 20 tabs open and no idea of which TinEye search was completed in what tab. Favicons come to the rescue. If you are not familiar with a favicon: it is basically the little icon that appears on the tab of the website you are visiting. So what happens within TinEye: we create a dynamic favicon based on the query image.
- Bigger index, more cool searches!
A bigger index means more amazing image searches with even more matches in TinEye!
I don’t know what strikes folks to edit a particular image more than others, but there are some fantastically popular ones out there that you all love to photoshop.
We’ve shown you everything from Mona Lisa to Angela Jolie in other posts, so let’s take a look at the guys that you’ve cropped, re-coloured, written over and otherwise edited into almost unrecognizable copies of their original image.
You can click on any image below to view the results more closely.
First in the queue, Gerard Butler from the movie 300. Search count? 526 results searched over 701 million images. If you have a TinEye login, search it.
Keeping with the “men from historical tales” theme, let’s take the Creation of Adam for a spin. A very respectable 635 results! Search it.
And before everything there was just earth (nod to Yogendra on this one). Our planet, in it’s myriad of forms, tops today’s search results with over 1000 matches returned. Search it.
Since we’ve a bit of a history theme here today, let’s wrap it up with “Las Meninas” by Diego Velázquez. This is a very nifty search (I wish I could show you more results). TinEye finds not only edits, crops and colour changes but also skews and even photos where this particular piece of art is on a wall or obscured in the background. With 277 results, “Las Meninas” is obviously a much loved (and edited) image on the web. Search it.
Need an account? Pop over and register and you’ll be able to TinEye images in no time!
- Watch our CTO Paul Bloore demo TinEye for Robert Scoble
Our CTO demos TinEye at the Microsoft Pro Photo Summit. Check out the Scobleizer Qik video from this morning in Redmond!
In Scoble’s words “Wow…that’s crazy technology”!
- 702,000,000 images indexed…and counting
What’s next for TinEye? Simple. More images. Bigger index. And today there are 702 million images in our index. Yes, that’s not a typo.
Millions more images for you to search in real-time.
Happy searching TinEye fans. The best is yet to come!
* image Alistair Morton
- TinEye is growing…
TinEye is now searching 586,000,000 images. Yes, that’s 586 million images in real-time. We have added a 100 million images to our index and there is more to come very very soon. Happy searching!
(Photography by Charlie Ambler)
- Little changes, big effects! TinEye tweaks and new features.
We’ve added a few new features and tweaked our TinEye interface to make searching even easier. I know you are sending us a lot of feature requests and we have some great new things coming down the pipe - we are on it folks! But in the mean time here is the latest and greatest:
- The feedback link no longer overlaps with the search button on smaller screens. We want your feedback so we are making sure you can email us no matter what screen size you are using!
- We have a new image upload throbber. Our subtle image upload progress bar was kind of easy to miss and sometimes failed to progress at all! You told us this a few times in the last weeks so we replaced it with a nifty new throbber. Now the “upload an image” and “search the web” buttons are disabled while an image is being uploaded. The throbber throbs :-) from the time you select an image to the time the TinEye results are displayed on your screen. This is quite helpful as you will no longer be wondering if your upload is progressing.
- You can now manually switch to a non-Flash image uploader. By default, Flash powers our “Upload an image” feature and if you don’t have Flash installed or enabled, we fall back to a non-Flash uploader. But sometimes for reasons beyond our control, even when Flash is installed and enabled, it doesn’t always co-operate and you can’t upload an image! Now there is an option at the bottom of the TinEye search page that allows you to manually switch from Flash to non-Flash uploader at any time.
- Another neat feature requested: Distinguish browser tabs from one another and provide summary information. Now when you have several TinEye searches open in tabs, you can see the query image and the number of results found right in the tab. We know how much you like searching, so we are making easier for you to keep an eye on what you have been searching for during your session.
- Tux: Boy does he get around!
Our snazzy image search engine is getting a lot of notice these days, thanks to our great community. Did you see us on Digg? Awesomeness! We love our TinEye fans, thank you everyone!Do you need a TinEye account? Get it here. Go, Go! There are 500 ‘instant accounts’ available…499…498…
TinEye finds your images online, matching the “fingerprint” of your image (let’s use our pal Tux over there) to the millions of other images in our index to find where and how your image is being used on the web.
Tux is awfully cute just the way he is, but how has his little image been used around the internet? Just have a look at the Tux widget!
To see all the different ways folks have edited Tux just press play. We used just 155 of the images identified to create the Tux widget, but TinEye actually found over 800 results in mere seconds!
We like to share here at idée, so go ahead and play with it, embed it and share it with your friends. We even made a tiny Tux that you can easily pop onto your site!
And we have a Mona Lisa widget too. You can learn more about these toys on their TinEye page.
Have you found a cool search with lots of variations that you think would make a good widget? Let us know!
- Everything is Visual: Introducing the TinEye Mona Lisa Widget
Because we love to have fun at the idéeplex we came up with a snazzy, embeddable widget that demonstrates the image identification technology behind TinEye: the image search engine!
What is TinEye you ask? Given an image to search for, TinEye tells you where and how that image appears all over the web - even if it has been modified.
When you want to find out where an image is being used on the web, you submit it to TinEye by uploading it, pointing to it on the web or right clicking using the TinEye plugin.
The image itself is analyzed instantly, and its “fingerprint” is compared to the fingerprint of every single image in the TinEye search index of almost half a billion images.
The result? A detailed list showing all the images and the websites using that image, worldwide.
[If you can't see the widget click here]
All of the Mona Lisa images in our widget were found on the web by searching on TinEye for the first, unedited Mona Lisa image in the series. We took the results of our search and put them into this image flow interface, which allows you to scan through all the images and see the differences between them.
Give it a try, press play! This little widget is embeddable: this means that you can simply grab the code and embed it on your blog or website. Go ahead, we’re cool with you sharing and distributing it. Do you like it? You can Digg it too!
Did you know that the Mona Lisa is one of the most used images in product marketing in the world? While we only used 150 unique Mona Lisa images in this nifty little demo, TinEye actually found almost two thousand results searched over 487 million images!
Try pulling one of the Monas out of line, she’s snap right back in. Go forward, go back, stop to look more closely at an image. Interested in one? Click the corresponding url and off you’ll go to one of the thousands of websites featuring Mona Lisa in all her variations.
What is this? You don’t have an account yet? Today is your lucky day! We have 500 ‘instant’ accounts to our beta available. Sign up!
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