Reverse Image Search: TinEye, you will love it

I came across TinEye a few months ago, while doing my coursework for one of my Astronomy courses. At that point, I was stucked because I had a few images for which I had to guess which particular planet they belong to, and what exactly the features shown on them were. I had a vague idea of some of them, but I wasn't particularly sure and I wanted to double check, rather than getting it wrong. The Solution? 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. It is free to use for non-commercial searching. "

TinEye regularly crawls the web for new images, and they also accept contributions of complete online image collections. To date, TinEye has indexed 1,953,157,319 (and counting) images from the web to help you find what you're looking for."

It did help me find my images, giving me reputable sources (NASA, mostly). And it will help you too if you ever have images, but do not have a description for them.

Do you want even more? Then check Idée Lab which showcases visual search and image recognition technologies.

Use it now, thank me later. ;)

General Resources: How to find images on the internet

Here is a good source of information to find virtually any image you can think of on the wonderful and amazing world of internet. Beware some of them might be copyrighted, or have a creative common license; some others might ask you for a few bucks, but the choice is yours.

Option 1 - search engine 

• Ask image search
• Google advanced image search 
• Yahoo image search

Option 2 - Creative Common Images 

• Creative Commons Web site 
• Creative Commons image search 
• Google Creative Commons search
• Yahoo Creative Commons search 
• everystockphoto.com is a search engine for creative commons photos, located in Vancouver

Option 3 - Free stock image collections

• DeviantART 
• FreeFoto.com 
• Free Images.co.uk 
• Imageafter 
• MorgueFile (The term “morgue file” is popular in the newspaper business to describe the file that holds past issues flats) 
• OpenPhoto.Net 
• Stock.xchng 

Option 4 - Media Sources

• AFP (Agence France-Presse)  
• Empics (Press Association) 
• Nettizen Online Newspaper Directory 
• News Directory, a guide to all online English-language media (worldwide), over 3,600 newspapers, 4,800 magazines, hundreds of television stations plus colleges, visitor bureaus, governmental agencies, travel links, and comics ; more than 14,500 links in all 
• NI (News International) Syndication 
• Reuters

Option 5 - Photojournalist resources

• Association of Photographers 
• EPUK (Editorial Photographers United Kingdom & Ireland) 
• NPPA (National Press Photographers Association) 
• NUJ (National Union of Journalists) 
• World Press Photo

Option 6 - Commercial images

• About the Image blog 
• BAPLA (British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies) 
• BigStockPhoto 
• Big White Box 
• Clipart.com 
• Corbis 
• Getty Images 
• Fotolia 
• iStockPhoto 
• Jupiterimages Unlimited 
• PACA (Picture Archive Council of America) 
• Stockxpert

 Option 7 -Historical Images

• UNESCO’s Archival Portal, an enormous portal to archives around the world, a bit overwhelming. 
• UK Public Libraries Page, access to images available at local libraries in the UK 
• UK Higher Education and Research Libraries
• Sensitive Map
• Libweb, a portal to 7500 libraries in 135 countries which contain of course images 
• 24hourmuseum, a virtual UK museum 
• Cornucopia, an online database of information about more than 6,000 collections in the UK’s museums, galleries, archives and libraries 
• Virtual Library Museums Pages
• EIG (Education Image Gallery), nice resource for schools 
• EnrichUK, a searchable portal linking 150 websites that have been supported with Lottery good causes money from the UK 
• BBC History 
• PBS History, some pictures, but mainly movies ; still a nice portal with lots of material including teacher resources (PBS, headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, is a non–profit media enterprise owned and operated by the nation’s 348 public television stations) 
• Scran, part of the Scran Trust – a registered charity – whose aim is to provide educational access to digital materials representing our material culture and history 
• British History Online 
• Best of History Web Sites 
• Voice of the Shuttle