If a picture is worth a thousand words then isn’t it be great if you can search using an image ?. There would be times when you wanted to search for an image but you don’t find keywords to describe the image. Gone are the days where you cannot search for an image itself to query for an image, Now you can use Reverse Image Search for this problem.

What is Reverse Image Search ?

Reverse Image Search is a technique through which you can retrieve an image using image itself as a query. It uses Content-based Image Retrieval ( CBIR ) also known as Query by Image Content ( QBIC ) to retrieve the image.

Ways to Search for an Image ?

There are two ways in which you can search for any Image. Either by using Meta Data of an Image or by the content of the Image. Meta data of an image refers to the keywords, alternatives, tags or description that an image contains. The other way of searching for an image is by using content of the image like shape, color, shapes or any other data from the image .

Where to search using an Image ?

There are two places where you can search for an image and If you don’t find the image that you are looking for in these two places then leave trying to search any where else because I am pretty confident that if these giants cannot retrieve the image data then there would be no other place in internet to perform the query for an image because the successful image search will be directly proportional to number of images that it would search for the match shortly the index.

1. Google Images Search

Google is one of the best place where you can start searching with, I remember when I used to search for a similar image using google’s “search similar image” feature which individually appears for every search result but it’s in early 2011 Google has announced “Inside Image Search” through which we can search for an image using image itself.

It is as easy as dropping an image from your computer onto the browser or giving the link of the image for search. Google uses both the meta data and content data of the image to provide you with result of the search because of which it not only gives you the exact match but also provides some relevant images to the image that you have searched.

Here is a short video which describes how you can use this feature.

To use Google Image Search just go to images.google.com

2. TinEye Image Search

TinEye Image Search is one of the web’s first reverse image search engine which was there in the web since 2009. I remember this is the only the proper tool in web to search for an image in web but later google joined the club.  As I mentioned earlier the success of reverse image depends on how many images that it has in index, TinEye has as many as 2,180,913,080 images in its index to present date where your image result can be one among them.

To use TinEye Image search just go to TinEye.com

If you frequently reverse image search then it would be good if you consider installing addons/extensions for these searches. Just google, relevant addons / extensions available for both of these searches.

 

Usage Tips : Most Common Purposes

Now you can use these services to find out the name of celebrity whose picture was set as your friend’s profile picture.

Find out the name of the place which you don’t know for a popular picture .

Searching for an image which is relevant in terms of color, shape or posture.