Sites like Flickr and Picasa have allowed both personal and professional photographers to showcase their photos online, but with this, it has been even easier for businesses and agencies to steal these images and use them for their marketing without giving proper attribution to the creator.
Until today, I didn’t know if there was a decent tool that could tell you if your images were being stolen and used against your wishes. That was until I found TinEye, a service that can scan billions of images on the internet and find out where your images are being used.
Using the service is extraordinarily easy, all you need to do is upload the image you wish to check or directly link to it via it’s URL. I used an image that is present all over the internet to demonstrate how it functions, as you can see it matched 193 sites that were using it, although I think that it is probably a lot more widely used than that.
There is also a Firefox extension allowing you to check on your photos from the comfort of your browser toolbar.
If you suspect your photos are being used against their copyright, this tool will help you track the content thieves down.
