Google to the rescue

Did you know that you can search for images across the web just by dropping the image into the Google image search field?

Like this:

Go to Google and search for an image (click on “images”):

This takes you to the image search:

Now you can simply drop images from your desktop, say, onto the search field (where it now says “google” in the image above) – and it will expand and search.

And now, Google does two things:

  1. It displays all uses of that exact image that it has found on the Internet;
  2. It also shows similar images, with a very clever algorithm that searches for similar-looking images by shape and colour.

Amazing. And enlightening, quite often. This Hongkong-based outfit used one of my images without permission (I am now talking to them); and this Vietnamese person did the same, with the same image. And that’s after just a few minutes searching random images. I suppose some more searching is called for!

If you have not yet used this incredible search function, I suggest you give it a try. Start with images you yourself have blogged, so you can see that it does indeed work.

 

4 thoughts on “Google to the rescue

  1. Thanks for the tip. I tried Google and did find one of my images being used commercially. From your experience what is the best way to approach the company? Many thanks for a great blog and a super resource.

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