TinEye

I love tineye. Fake facebook profiles don't stand a chance when trying to add me, lol. Occasionally (but rarely) they aren't able to find photos that I know are popular and from the web, and that's why I didn't give it a full 5 stars. I definitely recommend tineye though.

I like this website. It can do a picture search and tell you all kinds of things.

"TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.'

TinEye is a "reverse image" search engine. Simply, this means you can upload an image to TinyEye.com, and it will find "all instances" of that image, in various sizes, resolutions, etc.

You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.

TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. It is free to use for non-commercial searching.

TinEye regularly crawls the web for new images, and we also accept contributions of complete online image collections. To date, TinEye has indexed 1,432,495,997 images from the web to help you find what you're looking for. It has an easy-to-use UI, and comes in remarkably handy when you need a better/different version of that pic you found!
Ron.

If TinEye succeeds in indexing the web quickly enough, it'll be able to offer unmatched image recognition technology in a usable form. They're aiming to compare any image that you upload or point them to with every other image out there and tell you where it's already appeared - every single duplicate of that image, even if it's been modified subsequently, which is, you must admit, dead clever. The engine is not able to handle face recognition, though, and typically returns exact matches, not similar images.

If successful, it will help copyright owners to find unauthorized copies of their work, and help out folks like us who are trying to figure out if a site is authentic, by letting us see if images are original or not. It will find higher or lower resolutions of the same image. It will help identify the subject of an image that has no description, and so on. Registered users may save their searches and registration is free, though the engine is available to anyone and anyone can recommend a site to be indexed.

Currently they've already indexed over a billion images and that number is constantly increasing. It sounds a lot, but it's a tiny percentage of the images to be found out there (Photobucket alone hosts more than 8 billion images), and that figure is growing all the time too. You may strike lucky already, but don't be discouraged if you're unsuccessful. Bookmark this one for a return trip a little further down the line.

There is a version for the iPhone (naturally) and a useful plug-in for Firefox that adds a search option to the right-click menu.

For people who can see a use for this, it's going to be a great asset for sure.