Have you ever found a picture that you want to know more about? Like a place, a travelling location, a product or may a celebrity? You may want to read more on the image and get information about it. This is where reverse image search engines come into play. You can use this service for this sole purpose and many others using reverse image search engines.
Reverse image search engines can help you find information regarding an image without feeding in any keyword in your search engine. You can use this service by uploading a clicked photo or image. Most users are unaware that such a service exists, leading to the lack of popularity about the various types of Reverse search engines out there.
Let’s take a look at the various reverse image search engines out there that can come handy when looking to find information on an image.
Google, in many ways, is the one-stop-shop for all our needs. In June 2011, Google Images introduced a new reverse image search feature.
It makes use of algorithms based on various attributes like shape, size, colour and resolution to get similar pictures. There is no limit on the file size or file type, and it has the most significant number of images indexed. All of this and it’s for free!
TinEye is a Toronto-based company that is the product of Idee Inc. One of the most widely used reverse image search engine until now. They claim to be the first reverse image search company with this technology. TinEye supports JPEG, PNG, and GIF images, and the upload size is limited to 20 MB. Their service doesn’t search for people and objects, but it is searching for the picture as a whole. You can also use it to track any illegal images use that are copyrighted and are stolen. Making it another top reverse search engine. It has been the most popular and widely used reverse search engine till date with 13.9 billion images indexed. Its free version allows one to have 150 searches per week.
Introduced in November 2015, Pinterest Visual Search Tool lets you search for visually similar images. It is by far the most advanced reverse image search engines ever developed. Unlike other search engines, you do not need to upload an entire image but can zoom on zoom on a particular image and drag the zoom tool over it to search for the apt pin. You can use this feature as you are browsing Pinterest, but you come across something that you don’t know what it is called. Using the visual search tool, you can search for similar images and information.
Microsoft introduced Bing Image Match in March 2014, a new feature in its very own search engine. In this, a user can either upload the image or add it using the hyperlink and Bing will return the matching search results. It’s simple to use as compared to some other reverse image search engines. The only downside to this app is that it is restricted to certain countries.
Karma Decay is an exclusive reverse image search engine made for Reddit. Reddit has many submissions that can be a re-posting one, to solve this image search engine for Reddit has helped many users on that social network. It comes handy and saves you time to not post the same content again n Reddit since the website does not approve of resharing the same material. You can use the tool to limit the search to a particular subreddit by uploading an image.
IQDB is another excellent reverse image search engine which will allow you to get information about any image that you found online. With a max limit of 8 MB upload, this reverse image search engine works on similar ground and supports file with formats JPG, GIF, JPEG. The only downside to this website is that focuses a lot of its search on anime and is not as universal as some other search engines in this list.
Yandex is a Russian search giant and has this reverse image search to track duplicated images. It supports PNG, GIF and JPEG formats and can filter results according to them. It’s a hassle-free reverse image search engine without the need of signing up. It is also free and works smoothly. If you are using Yandex browser, you can quickly run the search for any image on almost any website by right-clicking on it and then hitting search for this image on Yandex.
The Wolfram Languages Image Identification Project aka Image Identify is a search engine that is a work in progress project. However, it is capable of delivering information about images that you search for on the platform. Just drag and drop an image onto the webpage and the service will try to identify what the image is. A lot cannot be said about this since it’s still being developed. But, it is undoubtedly one of the best examples of how artificial intelligence can be put to use. It can effectively help you find images of popular landmarks, famous people, animals, plants etc.
Reverse image search for mobile devices with apps – Reverse image search apps for Android and iOS:
Google Goggles, TinEye + Google, Unravel
Reverse Image Search Add-ons for Prominent Browsers: Google Reverse Image Search (Firefox), Search by Image for Google (Chrome), TinEye Reverse Image Search (Plugin)
Which one have you used from the list above, do let us know if you have another search engine that searches image reversely?