Reclaim Your Stolen Images – Here’s How

13:17 16 December 2019

In this day and age of social media and digital dependence, it no longer comes as a shock to most to find stolen images. Be it a gorgeous photo you took of the sunrise on a trek or a beautiful painting you’d spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on, theft of images of all kinds is unfortunately commonplace nowadays and even goes undetected most of the time. There are a lot of ways to keep your images safe and prevent your copyrights from being abused, despite how vast the internet is and how impossible it may seem. Here’s how to go about it –

Reverse Image Search

It’s highly unlikely that a random search on Google with the hopes of instantly finding what you’re looking for will work out. With the billions of images indexed on the website, you’ll need a lot of specific keywords and filters to even get close to your intended result. That’s why Google and other search engines let you do a reverse image search, and here’s how it works.

Let’s take the reverse image search tool by https://reverseimagesearch.us/. It allows you to upload an image, of which it’ll display a multitude of results - different titles under which it can be found online, pages with similar images, and so on. This helpful tool thus lets you track down all blogs and websites that are using your copyrighted images illegally. 

As ideal as this handy tool may seem, the process can be quite complex as you’re allowed to look up only one photo at a time. Since Google Images doesn’t specialize in reverse image searching, you’re bound to receive inaccurate results as well. There is, however, a solution to these problems.

TinEye

While Google Images isn’t exclusively reserved for reverse image searching, there are websites out there that have been set up to focus on helping its users find their stolen images, like TinEye. This search engine lets you upload an image or search for one by URL and then displays possible matches, letting you compare its finds with the original image. The technology used by TinEye and similar reverse image search engines is not based on keywords or watermarks, but image identification. With over 38 billion images indexed on TinEye, it’s highly likely that if your images have been stolen, TinEye will find them for you. 

Another added advantage of TinEye is that it lets you add a collection of images to look for, compared to the meager one-image-per-search limit of Google. This bulk searching allows you to sleuth through the internet much easier and quicker.

TinEye, however, does come at a cost (quite literally). Unlike Google Images, which is completely free of cost, TinEye only allows you up to 150 free image searches a week, beyond which you’ll have to pay $200 a year to make use of their services more. $200 is seen by most as a justified price to pay to keep their copyrighted images safe and out of the hands of image thieves.

As vast and deep as the Internet may be, several ways have been developed by like-minded people around the world who wish not to be cheated out of their copyrights. You can rest easy knowing these ways exist and work to help you keep your images safe.