Pursuits : Elizabeth Thomsen

TinEye is a reverse image search engine — show it an image, and it searches for copies of the images on other web pages. It uses complex algorithms that allow it to recognize pictures even if they have been cropped or altered. I first wrote about this over a year ago here: TinEye Image Search

I enjoyed playing around with the service, and I especially liked the examples using iconic images like American Gothic and Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. It’s fascinating to see all the different ways these images have been changed and used for various purposes, and it’s impressive that TinEye’s algorithms are able to identify these altered images as copies of the original work.

However, as interesting as I thought Tineye was, I didn’t actually find it much practical use in finding unauthorized copies of my images on other webpages. I searched for some of my photographs that were used on various pages that I knew about, just to test it out, and had very little success. Tineye acknowledged that its database was still relatively small but growing all the time, but I stopped bothering using it to look for copyright issues. I had better success looking in my Flickr referrer logs and just doing word searches on Google Images.

But recently I decided to give it another try, and was quite impressed with my results. I searched a few of my photographs and found several unauthorized copies on various websites. Nearly all of my photographs are posted on Flickr with a Creative Commons Attribution / Non-Commercial / Sharealike license, and it’s discouraging to find people downloading them and using them without the required attribution, and on commercial sites. I send a message to each site asking that they add the credit line or remove the image, and most people apologize and comply. A few don’t respond or don’t seem to understand the problem, and one person was quite rude. It seems that there are a lot of people who ought to know better, including bloggers, journalists, teachers and sometimes even my fellow librarians, who would never commit plagiarism and give sources for quotations but treat other people’s photographs as if they had no value other than as eye candy, unworthy of a simple credit line. It’s especially annoying to find my work used without credit on blogs whose content is marked All Rights Reserved.

(You’ll have to forgive the soapbox — I found a lot of my uncredited copies of my photographs floating around the web today, thanks to Tineye!)

Links:

• TinEye
• A Simple TinEye Tutorial