Is Anyone Using Your Image?

by Josh Chase on December 30, 2009

Reverse image search

Searching for images that you have created on the web is easy. There is a a great handy little website called TinEye. If you are a photographer or designer, it is important to know if your images are being used without your permission. Depending on the licensing for your work, you may want to follow up with individuals or businesses who are using your work without your expressed permission.

What TinEye does is a reverse images search on the web to find out which sites are using the image, even if they have a different name for the image.

Take for example the image we use on Run Level Media.

This image is called “rlmhome.jpg” Not very SEO friendly, but I wanted to show how incredible this was with the search. So I entered the URL http://runlevelmedia.com into the query box, what it does is grabs all the images from the page of the URL that you enter. Then you simply click on the image that you want to search.

As you can see from the screen shot below it yielded 4 other websites using the same image that I’m using. Since this is stock photo it also displays on the originating source. In order to stay original, or keep people on their toes about using content against the respective licenses, it’s a great resource for any image creator.

runlevelmedia-image-search-results

For more information visit the TinEye website where they have over one billion images cached, and let us know in the comments if you found any of your own images.

  • I just hope no one uses my real life picture...
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