How to Do a Reverse Image Search

[Treehouse Presents - Quick Tips: How to Do a Reverse Image Search with Chris Zabriskie] 0:00 Hi, I'm Chris. And in this Treehouse Quick Tip, we're going to learn how to do a reverse image search. 0:05 I'm sure you've all used Google Images to find images before. 0:10 Let's look up my favorite band, The Monkees. Yeah, there's plenty of photographs there. 0:13 So Google Images is great for finding photographs, but what if you have a photograph and you don't know where it's from? 0:17 Let's look up a picture of a butterfly. So we have a bunch of pictures of butterflies here. 0:23 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. 0:29 I don't know how to pronounce that, but it looks like a nice place—got a butterfly house. 0:38 Are we sure we're actually able to use this picture on our site? 0:43 There's a few ways we can do this. Google Images lets us reverse image search. 0:47 So I've saved the picture over here on my desktop. I'm going to drag it and drop it just like that. 0:51 It's going to upload it to their servers, and it's going to look for it. Hey, that is a monarch butterfly. 0:57 Google Images is also a great way to identify butterflies. 1:01 So this tells me what it is, and it also gives me a bunch of pages that have this image on them. 1:05 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. 1:09 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. 1:16 The top one here is from Wikipedia. As you can see, it's been used on a lot of other blogs, as well. 1:25 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. 1:31 And we can see here the photo's licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, 1:39 and some more details about the photo are up here. 1:45 Stand-alone version right here. Fantastic. Oh that's a nice, big one. 1:49 Let's do this one more time and search for The Monkees again. 1:54 Let's try and find this picture. Now it's at a website called 8notes.com. I'm not sure what that is. 1:59 But we're going to copy this, go back to TinEye, paste the URL here. 2:05 Let's see if we can use this picture of The Monkees. Well, best match, first result is Getty Images. 2:10 Now Getty Images is royalty free for the most part. Stock photography, repository—one of the largest in the world. 2:17 And it looks like this photo is not cool for us to use, unless we actually pay for it. 2:25 Let's see. Hey—$49, 3 month. 2:31 Forty-nine dollars for 3 months? Maybe this is something we want to license if we're writing a blog post about The Monkees. 2:36 But either way, this is not Creative Commons licensed. 2:41 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, 2:44 Google Images or TinEye are great resources for digging a little bit deeper into an image's history. 2:50 Now not every reverse image search is going to be quite that easy. 2:55 You may have to do some real research into trying to find something. 2:58 But never assume that just because you can't find where something originally came from, means that it's okay for you to use. 3:02 Chances are it's copyrighted, and you should treat any photo you find randomly online as something that is protected 3:08 and not able to be used in your project. 3:14 There are, of course, lots of places online to find Creative Commons and other freely licensed photos. Flickr is a great one. 3:16 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 3:23 in your projects, as long as you're following the very simple licensing terms. 3:31 But no matter what photos or images you're using, be sure you have the proper permission or license to use it. 3:35 And when in doubt, a quick reverse image search should help you out. 3:40