You've already started watching How to Do a Reverse Image Search
Found a photograph online that you'd like to use on your site, but not sure where it came from or who took it? Or are you a photographer who wants to know where your work is being posted? In this Treehouse Quick Tip, we'll learn how to do a reverse image search using Google Images and TinEye.
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[Treehouse Presents - Quick Tips: How to Do a Reverse Image Search with Chris Zabriskie]
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Hi, I'm Chris. And in this Treehouse Quick Tip, we're going to learn how to do a reverse image search.
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I'm sure you've all used Google Images to find images before.
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Let's look up my favorite band, The Monkees. Yeah, there's plenty of photographs there.
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So Google Images is great for finding photographs, but what if you have a photograph and you don't know where it's from?
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Let's look up a picture of a butterfly. So we have a bunch of pictures of butterflies here.
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We want to use one for our site. This one looks nice. And we see it's from a blog—this blogspot here for Davao CIty.
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I don't know how to pronounce that, but it looks like a nice place—got a butterfly house.
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Are we sure we're actually able to use this picture on our site?
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There's a few ways we can do this. Google Images lets us reverse image search.
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So I've saved the picture over here on my desktop. I'm going to drag it and drop it just like that.
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It's going to upload it to their servers, and it's going to look for it. Hey, that is a monarch butterfly.
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Google Images is also a great way to identify butterflies.
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So this tells me what it is, and it also gives me a bunch of pages that have this image on them.
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But it's still kind of tough to tell where this actually came from. So let's head over to a site called tineye.com.
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Here we can do sort of the same thing. Drag the butterfly over, it's going to give it a look, and it found all sorts of stuff for us.
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The top one here is from Wikipedia. As you can see, it's been used on a lot of other blogs, as well.
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But let's take a look at Wikipedia here, and we'll find this is actually part of a picture that's hosted at Wikimedia Commons.
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And we can see here the photo's licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license,
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and some more details about the photo are up here.
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Stand-alone version right here. Fantastic. Oh that's a nice, big one.
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Let's do this one more time and search for The Monkees again.
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Let's try and find this picture. Now it's at a website called 8notes.com. I'm not sure what that is.
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But we're going to copy this, go back to TinEye, paste the URL here.
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Let's see if we can use this picture of The Monkees. Well, best match, first result is Getty Images.
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Now Getty Images is royalty free for the most part. Stock photography, repository—one of the largest in the world.
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And it looks like this photo is not cool for us to use, unless we actually pay for it.
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Let's see. Hey—$49, 3 month.
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Forty-nine dollars for 3 months? Maybe this is something we want to license if we're writing a blog post about The Monkees.
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But either way, this is not Creative Commons licensed.
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So if you've got a photograph you want to use on your website or in your other project and you're not quite sure where it came from,
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Google Images or TinEye are great resources for digging a little bit deeper into an image's history.
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Now not every reverse image search is going to be quite that easy.
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You may have to do some real research into trying to find something.
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But never assume that just because you can't find where something originally came from, means that it's okay for you to use.
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Chances are it's copyrighted, and you should treat any photo you find randomly online as something that is protected
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and not able to be used in your project.
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There are, of course, lots of places online to find Creative Commons and other freely licensed photos. Flickr is a great one.
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If you go to Flickr and type in flickr.com/creativecommons—there it is—you'll find all sorts of images that are free for you to use
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in your projects, as long as you're following the very simple licensing terms.
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But no matter what photos or images you're using, be sure you have the proper permission or license to use it.
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And when in doubt, a quick reverse image search should help you out.
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