Ok, this software is a revolutionfor photographers and photo enthusiasts! But I’m getting ahead of myself… excitement and all. Let me introduce you to TinEye.com. The first true image search engine to hit the Net. Here’s my interview…

Welcome to Yanik’s Photo Blog TinEye, how are you today?

Thank you for having me, Yanik. I’m great! Thanks for asking.

For the folks that haven’t heard from you yet, please tell us what you are and what you do.

Well, Yanik, I’m the codename for Idée’s image identification-based web search engine, currently in private beta. I do for images what Google does for text. Just as you are familiar with entering text in Google to find web pages that contain that text, using me, you enter an image to find pages where that particular image (and modified versions of it) appears.

Incredible! How do you do it?

Well, Yanik, that’s my little secret but I can say this… I use sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms to find your image on the web without the use of metadata or watermarks. I instantly analyze your query image to create a compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it. I then search for your image on the web by comparing its fingerprint to the fingerprint of every single other image in my search index.

How come you can’t find my images online when I know they’re there?

That’s a good question. As you know, I’m still in private beta. As we speak I have indexed 486,637,255 images from the web. That’s only a small fraction of what’s out there. I am working hard by constantly crawling the Web and increasing my library.

Many of my readers sell images on stock sites. How can you help them?

Another good question Yanik! Have you thought of hosting a talk show? Well, using me to find photographers’ images online can help by doing 2 things. First, they can easily build a client portfolio in just minutes! As we know, most clients won’t give credit for used images or they’ll credit the agency like Shutterstock, IstockPhoto, Dreamstime or Fotolia. So finding clients can be a long or impossible process by using a standard search engine. Secondly, photographers could find users using their images illegally. Of course they won’t know if the image was purchased with the right license but they could find people claiming the images as their own.

Thank you very much for your time TinEye. Now let’s watch a quick walkthrough video of you in action!

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