Have you ever found an image on Instagram or Facebook and wanted to see if it appears anywhere else on the Internet? Or maybe you want to know if your image was stolen by someone else who posted it without permission?
In either case, you need to do a reverse image search. There are several different tools you can use to reverse image searches. In this article, I will explain how to find images of different sizes and how to find other websites with the same image.
Google Image Search
Google likely has the largest online image index than anyone else. If you’re looking for an image, the best place to start is images.google.com
Click on the small camera icon and the screen changes and you can either paste the URL of the image or upload the image you want to search for.
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If the image you want to search for is online, just right-click it and select Copy Image URL / Copy Image URL when using Google Chrome. In Edge, the only option is to save the picture to your computer. Other browsers have similar capabilities. You can copy the url of the image or download it.
Click “Search by Image” and you will see the following page of results:
In my test, I just took the url of one of the images in a post I wrote earlier. It was free stock photography, so I knew it was going to show up somewhere on the Internet. By default, Google tries to “guess” the meaning of the image as much as possible, but as you can see from above, QR codes have nothing to do with the holidays.
However, this is not what interests me in the search. If you are looking for a higher quality version of an image, simply click All Sizes under the Find other sizes for this image heading.
You will receive a list of the same image in all sizes that Google can find. If you go back to the main search page, you will see a “Pages containing matching images” section at the bottom. This will show you all indexed web pages with the same image somewhere on their site. You can click on the link to see the exact webpage with the image. This is a great way to find copyrighted images on the Internet.
If you need to frequently search for images, it would be a good idea to install the Search by Pictures extension in Google Chrome. It’s completely free from Google. The nice thing is that you can right click on any image and select Google Search with that image. There is no need to copy the image url or download and then re-upload.
TinEye
Another good option for reverse image searches is TinEye They have been around for a long time, they have over 25 billion images indexed, and they are focused exclusively on image search.
When you search on TinEye, the results are slightly different from how Google displays the results. Here’s an example of a Startbucks logo search:
By default, the results will be sorted by the most modified. This means that the image is the most different from the image you are looking for. If you want to see the same images, click the drop-down list and choose Best Match. If you want the highest quality images, choose Largest Image.
You can also click on the two options at the top to only display results from collections and only display standard images.
If you click on an image in the results, a small box appears that you can use to compare the image with your image. Click the Toggle button and it will move back and forth showing your and the corresponding image.
TinEye also has a Google Chrome extension that works in much the same way as Google, except for the fact that it loads its own results as shown above.
These are pretty much the best options for performing reverse image searches on the Internet. If you’d like to do a reverse image search on your smartphone, check out this post on PCMag Enjoy!
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