“What happens to the image I upload to TinEye for searching? Are they saved and added to your database? Can anyone else see them?” These are questions we often receive from our TinEye fans.
We understand why you’d ask such a question. At TinEye we respect your privacy and the design of our system flows from that. We never save the images you upload to TinEye. Nobody else can see the images you upload and search for.
When you upload an image to TinEye, we analyze it on our servers. This analysis automatically creates a fingerprint of your uploaded image using our image recognition algorithms. Then we take that fingerprint and look for matches against the index of fingerprints from billions of images we’ve crawled from the web. Within a second or so we display your search results and immediately delete the image you uploaded. That’s it. Your uploaded image is never added to our TinEye database of images.
To get started using the free TinEye reverse image search service in a couple of minutes, follow our simple step-by-step guide.
This post is one of a series to answer common questions we’ve received from our users and fans. Previously we covered how you can use TinEye to find the copyright owner of an image.
If you have questions we can help answer, please drop us a line anytime.
Happy searching!
