- TinEye makes the headlines (again!)
Yesterday the National Post poked fun at the cover of the new City of Toronto “Fun Guide”. The image of a smiling family on the cover was photoshopped to replace the original man in the photo with someone else.
A graphics editor at the National Post saw the suspicious-looking cover and decided to run it through TinEye. Sure enough, TinEye was able to locate the original image.
Compare the original image with the Fun Guide version by rolling your mouse over the image below.
- TinEye earns a star
TinEye helps Sheila Smart recover 1000 euros and that makes us happy. Here is her image and its unlicensed usage on a book cover:
- Our TinEye Firefox add-on on recommended list of add-ons!
Mozilla has created a recommended list of add-ons.
From Mozilla:
It allows us to feature add-ons that have done a good job of creating a unique and/or exciting enhancement to Mozilla software.
Our TinEye add-on made the category list feature for Photos, Music & Videos. Woot!
What are you still waiting for: go download it now!
- Using TinEye on a mobile device
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!
- CamStand Fakorama
Note 1 (June 2): As @InvisbleGreen pointed out; the images could actually be licensed and the photographer simply lying about their origin. So a blatant lie but not theft per say.
Note 2 (June2): the photographs have been removed from the website without explanation so they were likely never licensed. See the website screenshot at the end of this post.
Note 3: Daryl Lang from PDN Online picked up my blog post. Read the comments to his story. Very enlightening. Not only were the photographs on The CamStand not taken by the photographers who claimed to have taken then but the photographer profiles were also plagiarized! We have to thank David for his incredible detective work!
I am at a loss for words as to why anyone would pass someone else’s work as their own. A word of advice: you are going to need to become a more sophisticated image thief if you really don’t want to be found. Between the community (I was tipped by a photographer that I will credit once I hear back from him) and tools like TinEye you are going to have to up the anty. Seriously up the anty.
Mr. Kent Arlington from Kent Manufacturing Company manufacturer of The CamStand which is basically a camera stand: I am not even sure you exist but I can tell you that the macro photographs that you claim are your first attempt at macro photography are actually someone else’s work and they certainly were created a long time ago, not on June 1st, 2009.
Let’s look at “your” photographs:
TinEye tells me the above photograph which you mention having shot yesterday is actually an istockphoto photograph created by zimmytws and uploaded to istockphoto on February 19, 2007. Here are the TinEye results:
The TinEye search results:
Maybe the first image was just a mistake. So let’s look at “your” second photograph:
hmmm… Not original again: this photograph was taken by sandsun and was uploaded to istockphoto on April 4, 2007. TinEye, the little search robot that can, got to work and found these results:
I still want to believe that may be one, at least one of the photographs you claim as yours, are actually yours. But no. All my hopes were dashed:
Your coin photograph is also an istockphoto image uploaded by Alina Vershinskaya on July 28, 2007.
And your strawberry photo? Well it belongs to Joanna Pecha and it was upoloaded to istockphoto on March 15, 2009.
I don’t know what to say except: stop stealing being unethical and claiming that a photograph is yours when it is not. You will get caught. And I am just going to assume that most of the photographs on your website The CamStand are fake and stolen come from istockphoto. A brief look at this page confirms it again: I suspect there is no Heather Fields photographer and if she exists she is stealing lying as the photograph are from istockphoto contributors:
The original which was shot by Jared Hudson and the TinEye search results:
Does the camera stand you are selling really exist? Kent Manufacturing Company: you need to clean up your act. Thanks and bye for now.
New blog post with removed images!
The CamStand website also includes a list of contributing bloggers who are photographers. You can see their profiles here:
These bloggers include Mr. Kent Arlington and Ms. Heather Fields. Their profile photographs are actually istockphoto photographs:
- 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.
- Make search easier: Upload a set of images
Hey! You may not know this, but you can submit the URL of a page that contains many images to TinEye. What will happens is TinEye will scrape the page for images, and let you choose which ones to search for. If you take advantage of browser tabs, you can search for several images at once! Here’s a quick walk-through using some gorgeous photos from Flickr user wili as an example:
Start with a web page that contains several images which you would like to search. We used wili’s Explore! set on Flickr:
You’ll need the URL for this page to submit it to TinEye. Copy it from your browser’s navigation bar by selecting the full text, and then choosing ‘Copy’ from your right-click context menu or using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+C:
Paste the URL into TinEye where it says ‘Paste URL here’, and click Search:
TinEye will go to that URL and scrape all the images visible on that page (up to 15 images at a time):
Clicking on an image will allow you to search for it. However if you take advantage of browser tabs you can search for several of the images at once. For example in Firefox this can be done by selecting ‘Open Link in New Tab’ from the right-click context menu, or by holding the Ctrl button as you click on the image.
TinEye conveniently displays a tiny thumbnail (favicon) of the image you selected as well as the number of results found on every new tab that is opened:
Those tabs will all load in the background as soon as you create them, so you can go from TinEye result to TinEye result seamlessly!
If you like this functionality, you may want to install the TinEye bookmarklet, which lets you skip having to cut and paste a URL into TinEye. Instead, when you’re on a page with lots of images, you just select the TinEye bookmarklet from your browser’s bookmarks and you’ll jump right to the ‘Select and image’ page on TinEye.
Give it a try and tell us what you think!
- 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.
- Times of India caught red handed!
Rapchik’s blog this morning unearthed a great TinEye find on The Times of India - of course as we speak The Times of India is probably cleaning up its gallery but see for yourselves:
That’s Kareena Kapor who is an Indian film actress. But TinEye and
and hey, isn’t that Jennifer Lopez? The TinEye search results agree:
Visit the TinEye search page above and click on “Compare Images” under the first search result to see the photoshoping in action!
And who said Monday mornings can’t be fun! Thanks Rapchik.
- Seeing more than double!
Derek has a great little article about TinEye and the future of image recognition driven search over at About the Image. Since the launch of TinEye I have been keeping an eye out for images that I constantly see being used in outreach and marketing campaigns and I have noticed quite a few Everywhere Girls. I am very tempted to start a TinEye tracker just for business women with glasses or a girl blowing a dandelion used in the world of advertising. I am sure it would make for a few entertaining blog posts!
Derek’s article reminds me of Emily Steel’s article in the Wall Street Journal: When Marketers See Double.
TinEye is gaming changing, not only because it is a reverse image search engine: ie you give it an image as a search input to start your image search, but because it is the first search engine to allow you to actually see how an image is being used. It drives home the notion of image accountability and integrity.
[to be continued]
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