So, say you have an image you grabbed off the Internet and you want to find a larger size, but you can’t quite remember where you got the image in the first place? What do you do? Where do you go?
There’s gotta be an easy way, right?
Yep, there is, and you can find it at Google. It’s called Reverse Image Search. Just head over to Google.com and click the Images button in the upper left-hand corner. The page should reload and you should see a little camera icon in the search box.
Now, you have options here – you can either browse to where your image is on your computer, paste the URL of an image from another site (right-click on the image and select Copy image URL) or even drag and drop and image from your desktop into the search bar.
Whichever method you choose, after you hit the Search button Google will scour the internet for like-looking images to the one you uploaded. You can also click on the link at the bottom and watch a short video that offers more explanation.
What a great idea!
~Andrew
Tags: google, Image Search, Reverse Image Search
This is very interesting and a feature that is very helpful. Seeing as I create my own screensavers and wallpaper, I quite often use images from various areas on the internet and later wish to recall where they came from but I can’t always remember their original location. Thanks for sharing this info.
Good tip Steve, but I use TinEye, a Firefox addon. It simply involves a right click on the image, then a click on “Search Image on TinEye”.
It dishes up every occurrence of the pic on the internet, (well, maybe not every), together with close look-a-likes. I use it a lot to see whether someone has posted an original image or whether they have simply pinched someone else’s and modified it.
Noel
Thanks for sharing, Noel! This add on is available for other browsers too.
TERRIFIC
Regarding the Google issue, I do not get a camera when I click on the “images” button but I get an instructional video which explains it in a clear and to the point presentation without any distracting introducitons to the product.
Here is the link I get when I click on the “video”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maWx-ApkBCs
Thanks for the tip. I will now explore the options I didn’t know exisited. Keep up the new effort.
Also, I am glad that I have the right virus protection program. Didn’t know the difference between the free ones and the paid ones which I have.
Very useful tip. many many thanks. I am being educated every time i read your news letter of tips. Thanks again.
Amazing tip.
not working anymore for the past 4 daus or so for me.
Anyone else ?
@ Patriot – nope – has been down – deleted java/etc – re-loaded everything – nothin’. even turned off firewall thinking an update might now block it – nothing. frustrating. Crawled googles blogs – no mention. How convenient. Considering how GRI generally always returns images vs. nothing from Tineye, I miss it.
Awesome tip. All your tips are great, keep them coming.
Cant get it to work on iPhone. Any tips?
What a great piece of information. I tried it an bang it worked like a charm.
Thanks