Best Reverse Image search engines

1. TinEye

TinEye is a product of Idee Inc., a Toronto based company. It has been the most popular and widely used reverse search engine till date. TinEye, as per their claims is the first website ever to use the image identification technology. To use this service, you have to upload the desired image or provide its link and command the tool to hunt for similar pictures. The upload size is limited to 1 MB. You can’t upload pics beyond that. TinEye doesn’t recognize the persons or objects in the picture, but it recognizes the entire picture as a whole. It can also be used to track down illegal use of copyrighted images or the stolen ones. Thus, a very useful search engine.

 

2. Google Images

Google images is another widely used website to search images. Introduced a decade ago, Google images have the largest database than most of the other sites. The mechanism of reverse photo search here is via uploading an image from your computer or pasting the link of the image in the search bar itself, it works equally well both ways. Google images use algorithms based on various attributes like shape, size, color and resolution to get the similar pictures.

3. Multi-Service image search

Multi-Service image search engine is exactly similar except they have the many services, at least to say. You can search images following the similar procedures like above sites. Just that, here you get to include the places that you want to include in your image search. The search engine supports files in JPG, JPEG, GIF format and the maximum limit to upload one photo is 8192 KB.

4. Image Raider

Image Raider is another reverse image lookup engine worth mentioning. Though, you can’t compare it with Google Images because it uses Google search results to provide end results. But there are some additional features which makes this tool noticeable. Image Raider lets you input more than one image at a time, which means you can run a multi reverse image search by using this tool. Hence, it saves a lot of time.

 

Secondly, unlike other picture finder tools where you have only two options for imputing images (via URL or by directly uploading from the computer), here you have multiple options for providing input image:

  • Add image from XML sitemap
  • Add URL of a page and this tool will fetch all the images from that page and use them as input for running the search.
  • You can simply add images directly from your Flickr, DevianArt or 500px account.

If you are a designer or a photographer then you can use this tool to track websites where your work has been published without your permission or without proper attribution. Accuracy of search results is satisfactory and interface is easy to understand. This tool is worth giving a try.

5. Yandex

Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine also have a reverse photo search tool of its own. Yandex images lets you input the image via URL or by uploading directly from the computer. You can also filter search results by file type (JPEG, GIF, PNG) or by size (Small, medium, large, wallpaper or custom). Yandex developed this search engine to track duplicate images.

6. Baidu

China’s biggest search giant Baidu also offers reverse image search tool. Here, you can search using pictures but the results are not as accurate as provided by other search engines.

7. Karma Decay

Karma Decay is a reverse photograph search engine exclusively for Reddit. It’s a very handy tool to save yourself from re-posting the same content again on Reddit because Redditors do not like re-posts at all. Though, It searches for the image in all popular subreddits but if you want to limit the search to a particular subreddit, you can do that too. A simple and useful tool.