TinEye
As of October 7, 2009 PhotoShelter will be partnering with TinEye, the reverse image search engine created by Idée, to deliver new benefits to PhotoShelter members that help you monitor online image usage and help people using TinEye to find you.
What is TinEye?
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.
How does TinEye work?
When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or "fingerprint" for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in its index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match.
TinEye does not typically find similar images (i.e. a different image with the same subject matter); it finds exact matches including those that have been cropped, edited or resized.
What is TinEye used for?
There are many uses for TinEye, but here are a few:
- Locate web pages that make use of an image you have created
- Find out where an image came from, who created it, or get more information about it
- Research or track the appearance of an image online
- Find higher resolution versions of an image
- Discover modified or edited versions of an image
What's happening with the PhotoShelter/ TinEye partnership?
PhotoShelter is integrating with TinEye to ensure that your images can be found by the TinEye search engine. All of your publicly searchable images hosted by PhotoShelter will be added to TinEye's index. The result is that anytime someone searches TinEye for an image that you originally created and have hosted by PhotoShelter, your PhotoShelter website (or gallery page) will appear in the results. This means you can be identified as the original owner of the image, and if you are licensing or selling images online, the image can be purchased directly from you at the link provided by TinEye.
What does TinEye do with my images?
When you mark an image as publicly searchable on PhotoShelter, it is automatically entered into TinEye's index. A fingerprint of the image is created on TinEye's databases — TinEye securely stores a medium resolution version of your image that is never displayed. Unlike some solutions, nothing is embedded in your images. When someone searches TinEye for images, TinEye looks for a matching fingerprint within its index. If the image matches your PhotoShelter-hosted image, it will appear in the search result. A small thumbnail is displayed in the search results, with a link back to your image that resides with PhotoShelter.
What if I don't want my images indexed by TinEye?
TinEye is only indexing the PhotoShelter-hosted images that you've marked as "publicly searchable". If you do not wish to have your images indexed, do not mark them as publicly searchable.
Why can't TinEye find my image in use? I know it is on the web.
There is a huge and growing amount of images on the web, and despite having indexed over 1 billion images, TinEye has only crawled a fraction of them so far.
