- A simple TinEye tutorial
For anyone who is new to TinEye (welcome!), or who just wants to brush up on the basics, here is a tutorial covering all of the essentials:
- Search using the website
- Search using the plugin
- Find the largest image, or the most transformed image
- Compare results to the original image
- Share your results
Search using the website
The website offers two methods of search: by URL or by upload.
To search by upload (i.e. search for an image on your local hard drive), just click the ‘Browse’ button and locate the file that you would like to search for.
To search by URL, just paste the address of the page or image that you would like to search. For example:
- This is an image URL: http://blog.ideeinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/TinEye-Heart.jpg
- And this is a page URL: http://blog.ideeinc.com/2010/02/23/tineye-index/
- You can also paste a whole domain URL: http://blog.ideeinc.com
If you search for a page or domain URL that contains more than one image, TinEye will ask you which image it is that you want to search for. Just click on the one you want.
Search using the plugin
We’ve got a plugin for Firefox, for Chrome and for IE. We’ve also got a bookmarklet that will work with any javascript-enabled browser.
For the plugin, simply right-click on any web image (it won’t work with images on your local hard drive) and select TinEye from the context menu.
You will be whisked away to the TinEye website to see your results.
Find the largest image, or the most transformed image
To find the largest or most transformed image in a set of search results, simply take advantage of the ‘Sort’ option on the left side of the screen.
‘Best Match’ is the default sort option and shows the images that are closest to your original image first.
‘Most Changed’ shows the images that are the most transformed from your original image first (i.e. the images that have been edited the most heavily).
‘Biggest Image’ shows you–you guessed it–the highest-resolution version of the image in your search results first.
Compare results to the original image
The ‘Compare’ tool lets you quickly switch back and forth between your result image and your original image. This animates any differences between the two images, making changes easier to see. It’s especially handy if you’ve sorted by ‘Most Changed’ and your image matches have been heavily edited.
Share your results
If you would like to share your search results with others, you can do this easily via Twitter, Facebook, or pretty much any other social media. Just use the ‘Share’ tools on the left side of the results screen.
If you want to share an individual match instead of the whole page of results, you can do that too. Click on ‘Link’ underneath the match that you want to share, and you’ll get a permalink to the results for just that particular image match.
And there you have it! All you need to get started as a TinEye power-user. Now get out there and put those skills to use!
- A groovy TinEye tutorial
Groove Dexter over at groovyPost wrote up a great tutorial on how to use TinEye. It covers finding larger versions of an image, using the ‘Compare Images’ feature to compare similar images, and finding out more information about the subject of an image. Check it out, you might learn something new!
- 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!
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