- Photoshelter partners with TinEye
What happens when you mix two really great things together? Generally, something super-great.And that’s why the TinEye team is excited to announce our partnership with the good folks over at Photoshelter, a leader in portfolio websites, photo sales and archiving tools for photographers.
In a couple of weeks, we’ll be adding the entire Photoshelter image collection to the TinEye search index, making it easy for TinEyers to find Photoshelter photographers as well as identify them as the original author of an image. Plus we’ll be keeping up to date by adding any new Photoshelter images to the TinEye index as they are introduced. Pretty neat, eh?
Check out Photoshelter’s TinEye announcement on their website, and stay tuned to TinEye for some lovely Photoshelter images coming soon!
Update: Check out Photoshelter’s recent blog post, explaining the partnership in more detail.
- Using TinEye on a mobile device
Attention iPhone, Blackberry and smartphone junkies! Did you know that you can easily use TinEye to search for images you come across while browsing the web on your phone? Yep, all you need to do is install the TinEye bookmarklet. A bookmarklet is a little script that can be saved as an ordinary bookmark. The TinEye bookmarklet scrapes all of the images from the page you are viewing and sends them to TinEye.
Below is a little walk-through on how to install and use the TinEye bookmarklet on a mobile device, using the iPhone as an example.
Installing the TinEye bookmarklet
The easiest way to install the bookmarklet on your phone, is to add it to your PC/Mac bookmarks first, and then sync your bookmarks to your mobile device. Bear with me, you will only have to do this once!
Start at the TinEye bookmarklet page. Add the bookmarklet by right-clicking the grey ‘TinEye Images’ button and selecting ‘Bookmark This Link’ or ‘Add to Favorites’. In Safari you can just drag the button into your bookmarks toolbar as below:
Here you can see that the bookmarklet has been successfully added to my browser’s bookmarks. It shows up as ‘TinEye images’:
Now sync your PC/Mac bookmarks to your mobile device using the sync software for your smartphone. For the iPhone, this is easily done in iTunes from the ‘Info’ tab for your device. You may sync your bookmarks independently of other data (contacts, music, email, etc.).
I’ve complete the sync, and the TinEye bookmarklet is now showing up in the Safari Bookmarks Bar on my iPhone. Success! Installation complete:
Using the TinEye bookmarklet
Now for the easy part. Using the TinEye bookmarklet is super-simple. Just browse over to a web page containing some images you would like to search. I’ll use the Picasso entry on Wikipedia as an example:
To search for any images on this page, just open up the bookmarks on your mobile device and select the TinEye Images bookmarklet. On the iPhone, your bookmarks are accessed using the icon circled in the screenshot above.
Once you select the TinEye images bookmarklet, all the images on the page you were just viewing will be scraped and sent to TinEye. To search for an image, just select the one you want and view your results:
Fun, no? Once you have your TinEye results you can sort them by size or closest match just as you normally would. See what sorts of interesting results you can find when you’re on the go with TinEye!
- Make search easier: Upload a set of images
Hey! You may not know this, but you can submit the URL of a page that contains many images to TinEye. What will happens is TinEye will scrape the page for images, and let you choose which ones to search for. If you take advantage of browser tabs, you can search for several images at once! Here’s a quick walk-through using some gorgeous photos from Flickr user wili as an example:
Start with a web page that contains several images which you would like to search. We used wili’s Explore! set on Flickr:
You’ll need the URL for this page to submit it to TinEye. Copy it from your browser’s navigation bar by selecting the full text, and then choosing ‘Copy’ from your right-click context menu or using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+C:
Paste the URL into TinEye where it says ‘Paste URL here’, and click Search:
TinEye will go to that URL and scrape all the images visible on that page (up to 15 images at a time):
Clicking on an image will allow you to search for it. However if you take advantage of browser tabs you can search for several of the images at once. For example in Firefox this can be done by selecting ‘Open Link in New Tab’ from the right-click context menu, or by holding the Ctrl button as you click on the image.
TinEye conveniently displays a tiny thumbnail (favicon) of the image you selected as well as the number of results found on every new tab that is opened:
Those tabs will all load in the background as soon as you create them, so you can go from TinEye result to TinEye result seamlessly!
If you like this functionality, you may want to install the TinEye bookmarklet, which lets you skip having to cut and paste a URL into TinEye. Instead, when you’re on a page with lots of images, you just select the TinEye bookmarklet from your browser’s bookmarks and you’ll jump right to the ‘Select and image’ page on TinEye.
Give it a try and tell us what you think!
- Share TinEye search results with friends
Question: When you happen upon some really great TinEye search results, what do you do? Well you can selfishly keep that precious gem all to yourself (Scrooge), or you can spread the wealth!
We’ve just made it dead simple to share interesting TinEye search results with the internets. Click or hover over our new ‘Share’ button and pick your poison: Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Digg, email or your blog… admit it, you’re a social media butterfly.
- Sorting TinEye search results
This is not new but since I have seen a string of email queries about sorting TinEye results, here is a little how to. First of all: yes, you can sort TinEye results. TinEye sorts results by:
- best match
- worst match
- biggest image
- smallest image
By default, your results are sorted by ‘best match’. What that means is that TinEye will list the best match to your search query as the first result. These image search results could be duplicate images or images that have been very very slightly modified.
To see the most modified image compared to your original search image you would need to rank your search results by ‘worst match’.
However you can also sort by ‘biggest image’ and ‘smallest image’. To sort your search results select your desired option from the ‘Sort order’ pull-down list above your results on the left side of the page. TinEye will remember your selection for the duration of your session. Happy searching!
- TinEye Firefox add-on
As most of you know, TinEye is our reverse image search engine. Go ahead try it, it does not bite and does quite a bit of searching too. We released our TinEye Firefox add on a few months ago and today it has close to 13,000 downloads!
- Open TinEye! And other stuff…
Well folks we’ve heard you loud and clear: “We don’t want to log in to use TinEye“. Good news! TinEye is now open for anyone and everyone to use, without the need to log in or register. Our registered friends – and there are almost 200,000 of you – however, will enjoy some great perks.
And there have been some other changes too!
- Registered users of TinEye will get the opportunity to try out new features first, and provide feedback. You will also be able to link to and share your search results with friends. You will also have the option to keep a search history, including a gallery of images with search dates and the number of results found. And don’t forget that registered users can subscribe to the TinEye newsletter to stay in the loop. Now would you just go and register?!
- We introduced automatic discard of search images after one hour. If you are unregistered–or if you are registered and have disabled search history in your profile–anything you upload to TinEye for search is discarded after an hour.
- We updated the TinEye plugin for FireFox to version 0.5. This update includes a bug fix where if text is highlighted with a background image beneath it, the plugin is not activated.
- The little business of ads appearing on TinEye. Well, they have arrived because little TinEye wants some fluids (especially Robot Oil and Bourbon). You want a free reverse image search engine right?
- We made improvements to search speed and you should be able to play with a faster and sharper TinEye.
Just for the new folks: TinEye is still only searching a 1 billion image index which means if you don’t find a match for your image search it is not the image recognition technology, it is the index! But now that we have this release out the door we will go back to working on the little things: like growing our index!
We appreciate your feedback so keep the kudos and love coming.
So what should you be searching for this morning? Well how about the Obama Hope image that is all the rage this morning? or the little angry baby? Happy searching folks and welcome to the future of image search brought to you by the good folks at Idée.
- TinEye now with the ability to sort image search results
A new release is here, and many of you will be happy to know that you can now sort your TinEye search results by both image size and match proximity. This was your most requested feature to date.
The sort function is located above your search results, on the right-hand side of the page. To sort your results, simply select which option you would like from the pull-down list. TinEye will remember your selection for the duration of your session.
“Biggest image first/last” allows you to view your results by image dimension, from largest to smallest or smallest to largest, respectively. This is a great way to get the highest resolution version of your search image.
“Closest match first/last” allows you to view the most similar image results first (the default), or move those images to the end and view the results with the most modifications first. Modified or digitally edited images are often quite interesting, so be sure to give this option a whirl!
For all the details on this week’s release, check out our What’s New page. And for the perpetually curious, we have updated our FAQ page, which is also now visible without a TinEye login. Happy searching!
- TinEye: a photographer’s best friend
In Visual search engine is photographer’s best friend PC Pro’s Stuart Turton takes a peek at TinEye and some applications of our image identification technology.
Turton also notes:
TinEye could provide an entirely new way for image companies and amateur photographers to track how and where their images are being used, without the need for digital watermarks.
Yes, TinEye can. TinEye answers two simple questions for anyone: “where is an image appearing” and “how is it being used?”. If you are wondering “where” and “how” then TinEye is for you. And we have some great plans for our users.
- TinEye now in open beta
Greetings, TinEyers! Good news for those of you looking for invites to share with friends, or those of you who have not had a chance to create an account yet. TinEye is now in open beta, which means that signup is instant and anyone can join the fun!
To create a free, instant account, just visit the TinEye website and click on the ‘Sign up now!’ link. You will need to verify your email address first, but once you’re done you can go ahead and search to your heart’s content.
And if you are as excited about TinEye as we are (and believe me, we’re an excitable bunch), then feel free to spread the word.
Photo by Justin Marty
RSS feed