Sunday, May 29, 2011

[Technology] Tineye the Reverse Image search engine - The infinite resource with a single picture.

Alright. I can see that many friends of mine just bump into my house, plug their USB in my computer, show my a manga's frame and want me to tell them which manga did that come from. I was always using tineye.com. Tineye works on every kind of picture, not just manga(if you just need to find manga, you can use idqb.org)
The idea is that you upload a picture to their server, and the server crawls on every websites and see if there are pictures that are similar to the one you upload. From those website you can find the source you want.
For example: I surf on the internet, and bump into a random girl's picture on a random website like this:
For this instance, assume I do not know her name, aside of just looking into the file name if there is any chance that there is her name in the picture, I will throw it on tineye.com. So here is the result:

Remember, for this instance, the girl we are looking for the source is an asian, so focus on korean, chinese and japanese sites. First, how about taking a look at the first link?
How comfortably, I've bump into a chinese site(see that chrome's site translator? Chinese(Simplified Han). Now, I can't even understand what this site say, so I will just translate it. And...
Tada! Gotcha!"Monday beauty: South Korea's top car models Huang Mei-ji (Hwang Mi-Hee)". So what you need to do is Google her name(Hwang Mei-ji or Hwang Mi-Hee).
Now there are lots more potential that can be done with this engine. You can almost find the source for everything except those that aren't posted anywhere. Well, at that point, you will need someone to find it for you.
Remember, using Tineye needs you to work with both adaption and common sense. Be wise when looking for the source.

26 comments:

  1. Awesome. I am going to check this out for myself.

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  2. Wow, that is amazing. I'm going to have to use this some time to see how well it works.

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  3. <3 Tineye.com
    You should mention you can download an add-on for mozilla/chrome that gives you a roght-click search function :) So handy :)

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  4. Tinyeye is such a great site. I always wondered how it worked though.

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  5. wow can't believe this isn't more widely used

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  6. Great information, I've never really understood this service but do now thanks to your informative post.

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  7. Nice find! Awesome information. It's scary to think what you can find with one picture.

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  8. That so freaking cool. I'm going to go try it.

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  9. I use this website all the time.

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  10. I love tineye, I use it all the time!

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  11. Awesome, I think I'm going to have lots of fun with this =D

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  12. i used it to find the background i had on my computer, i'd taken a screenshot but not actually saved the walpaper. tineye found it, but all the ones it had didnt fit the same way. oh well, close enough

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  13. extremely useful, its insane how much help is out there on the internet

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  14. Bloody useful. Such a good service.

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  15. This is like one of them music identification services, but for pictures. Cool!

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  16. I use tineye daily, whoever invented the reverse image search concept deserves a nobel prize :D

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  17. Once again a cool idea, but how will theyimplement it.

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  18. Ahh, this is cool!

    following :)

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