Internet theft is very common nowadays. Many people got the wrong idea that whatever you find on the Internet is free. Well it may be free for you to read or view but definitely not free for you to use unless you have permission. It is same like the concept of finding an unprotected wifi. If there is no WEP or WPA password, it doesn’t mean you can use the wifi. It a door to a house is not locked, it doesn’t mean you can go in to watch their TV and grab a beer from their fridge!
Images or pictures too can be easily found on the Internet and is widely being used anyone because very seldom people use any encryption to protect the images. Images should be conveniently allowed to be viewed immediately without installing any third part decryption software. That is why one of the most common way to protect an image is by watermarking the images. There will be some people who don’t care about the watermark and use your images. Here is how to find out if someone is using your images without permission.
TinEye is a reverse image search engine that is very easy to use. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in TinEye’s index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match.
Images uploaded to TinEye are not added to the search index, nor are they made accessible by other users. Copyright for all images submitted to TinEye remains with the original owner/author. Search images submitted by unregistered users are automatically discarded after 72 hours. Links to these searches will stop working after 72 hours, unless a registered user happens to save the same image.
TinEye offers this service for free. If you find this service useful, there are plugins for Firefox and Internet Explorer which allows you to search an image on TinEye via right click.
[ Visit TinEye ]