TinEye for Chrome

Often I have found myself wanting a better resolution for my picture so I can set it as a desktop wallpaper, or trying to find the creator of some photos I randomly saw on the internet, or checking the name of a car from an awesome image I encountered that really got my attention, and I bet you did that too.

And if perhaps you did not know, there is a way to find out all that information with only a simple right-click on an image.

TinEye is a smart web browser extension that lets us search for images, or search for certain information about them. From the TinEye Reverse Image Search option, available on the extension's button in your browser, you can access the search page, from where you can either upload an image or point to one through an URL that you copied.

Instead of using keywords, metadata or watermarks, TinEye has its own image identification technology that, whenever you submit an image to be searched, gives a digital signature for it, comparing it to all the other fingerprints of other images in its index and then retrieving its matches.

TinEye also tends to find exact matches and not images similar to the one you searched for. And it matches them even if the images have been resized, edited or cropped too.

There is a variety of formats that TinEye supports, the most common being JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF and even GIF files, but you do have to be aware that the searches will work best with images that are at least 300 pixels in any dimension for more accurate findings. You are limited to submitting files no bigger than 20 megabytes, so take that into account as well.

It is advised that images with watermarks be avoided, as the app will search for the watermark instead of the image itself.

TinEye offers us a secure way to find out where an image came from, get bigger resolution versions of it, track its appearance or locate the webpages that make use of the respective image in swift fashion. So if you use either Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Opera you can add TinEye as a browser extension and allow yourself to search for any web image with only a right-click.