New visual search engine TinEye could be a major breakthrough for photographers

Developed by the Canadian company Idee, the TinEye search engine is a fantastic new breakthrough in the realm of search engines that allows users to search for their photographs anywhere on the Internet. Users are able to actually search for a picture by uploading it, and then having the program run a pixel by pixel search across the ‘Net. All found instances of the image are flagged, regardless of whether it has been cropped, merged or digitally altered in any way.

Leila Boujnane, CEO of TinEye, has the following to say about their program.

“TinEye does for images what Google does for text. We are not limited by words, Google can only find an image if a particular search word is in proximity to it. We have the ability on a large scale to tell somebody where one of their images has appeared and how it’s being used.”

The program is also not limited by the quality of the input image according to Boujnane. She states that “anything you would consider a preview image or low resolution image would work. I can take a photograph of a picture in the Louvre with my mobile and upload it to TinEye and it would dump me on the page of that Wikipedia page related to that painting.”