With the surge of fake news, the need for Google reverse image search has increased extensively in recent times. More journalists now rely on this tool to find out the original source of the image, the date it was published on, and who published it. Similarly, reverse image lookup has also various other use cases. Imagine you’ve matched with someone on Tinder. You can reverse image search the picture of that person to find out more about them – and whether or not they are genuine.
Google reverse image search App is perhaps the most popular choice here. And we get it why! But did you know there also exist several of its alternatives? how google search by image works?
Yes, there are alternatives to google reverse image search that can even be better for your unique needs and requirements!! But before we jump on to those alternatives, let’s briefly cover how the reverse image lookup tool from this search giant actually works for google images reverse.
.
How To Do Reverse Image Search Android and Desktop?
Table of Contents
When it was launched, Google search by image was only limited to desktop users. Today, you can use it even on your mobile.
Visit https://images.google.com/. In the search bar, you will see a camera icon.
Click on the icon and upload the image, from your local disk, that you want to lookup online.
Also, you can do free reverse image search Google using a URL. If you have the URL of the picture you want to lookup, paste that URL.
After that, Google looks for that particular image across the web.
- It will return with the result of websites where this particular image is present.
- It will show you similar images to this one.
- It will show you different sizes of the picture you’re reverse searching.
Google search by image works well on all top browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari.
An important thing to note is that the images you upload for reverse image lookup and reverse google image search, they are hosted on Google Cloud anonymously. They cannot be discovered by any other users. Moreover, these images are automatically deleted from the Google cloud store in a few hours. So, if you’re too cautious of your privacy, you can rest assured.
5 Google Reverse Image Search Alternatives
Google image reverse search is powerful. But it isn’t perfect. It has its limitations. It might not always return with the desired results. This is where you would want to look at the alternatives.
There are many free reverse image meta search tools out there. Not all of them, of course, are good. Some aren’t powerful enough, others are plagued with bugs, and then there are those that deliver the poor user experience.
To help you get started, in no particular order, here are 5 better Google reverse image search iPhone app alternatives that you can rely on and even bookmark:
1. Bing Image Search
Bing is one of the top competitors to Google search. So, it isn’t a surprise that it, too, has its own reverse image lookup. And it isn’t a surprise either that the tool is powerful, quick, and assures to fit in your expectations.
It can crawl through the web to search for the exact or related image (of different sizes) that you have uploaded. In addition to uploading the image, you can even insert the link of the image.
Visit https://www.bing.com/images and click on the camera icon in the search bar.
Much like Google, Bing is quite serious about users’ privacy. The images you upload aren’t discoverable by anyone. And they are deleted automatically.
2. Yandex Image Search
Yandex is the most popular and most used search engine in Russia. It’s also the 4th most used search engine in the world. Millions of people use it. So, you can’t expect any less from it when it comes to reverse image search.
Yandex image search is simple to use, works incredibly well, and delivers a good experience on the back of desired results.
Visit https://yandex.com/images/search, click on the icon of the camera, and upload the image.
The search will return with exact-match images and/or related images of different sizes.
So, whether you’re looking for all the websites who have used a particular picture OR want related images that your competitor has used in his blog – Yandex reverse image search is a name to trust.
3. TinEye Reverse Image Search
Unlike others on this list that offer reverse image search as an add-on solution, TinEye is a dedicated platform that exists entirely for this purpose. It’s a leading name in this niche, playing a favorite to millions of users.
It has a no non-sense design and underlying technology that can find you the source of an image in no time.
Visit https://tineye.com/ and either upload the image or enter the link of the image.
Claiming to be the experts in “computer vision, pattern recognition, neural networks, and machine learning” – TinEye is indeed as amazing as it describes itself. To date, it has indexed over 41.4 billion images.
Thankfully, it doesn’t save any of your images; as it says “your images belong to you”.
TinEye Reverse Image Search also offers a browser extension. Once installed, you can then easily reverse search an image on any website by right-clicking and selecting “Search Image on TinEye”. The extension is available on Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.
4. Pinterest Visual Search Tool
Even in the world of ‘Gram and Snaps, Pinterest still stands as one of the foremost image-sharing platforms with consistent growth. Of course, it’s more than just about sharing images. Among many features, it offers a visual search tool.
Pinterest Visual Search Tool is quite powerful. And rightly so – after all, it has a very huge database of user-generated visual content. So, a reverse search can bring you many similar, related, or exact images.
To use this tool, you need to have a Pinterest account. Create one if you don’t already have it. Upload the image that you want to reverse search. Click on the pin and at the bottom-right corner, you will see a search icon. Click on it.
It will return with “More Ideas”; more similar images.
Admittedly, Pinterest Visual Search Tool isn’t like any other traditional free reverse image search tool. But with Pinterest so big and popular – with so many images – it’s worth mentioning here; it’s worth trying. It might not be a tool to bust fake news and figure out the source of a visual. But it’s a great tool to find related and similar images.
5. Plaghunter
It’s a popular image plagiarism checker that promises to “save you hours”.
It is primarily targeted to website owners and photographers. However, lawyers and journalists can use it too for their investigations.
If you click original pictures and want to keep a tab of all those websites who are republishing and reusing your pictures, Plaghunter is perfect. Just upload the images and this tool will monitor – 24/7 – who is using those images on their sites This saves you the time of going to any reverse image lookup all the time and manually checking the unsolicited use of your images.
You have to create an account to use it for free. It has a very simple and straightforward dashboard.
So, this one is really more than just a reverse image search tool. Plaghunter has plenty of other features too that certainly makes it a tool worth checking for every serious photographer (and illustrator).
6. Another way to reverse search your images is with the Image Prospector app.
Image Prospector is powered by Google’s Image Search API, and it allows you to bulk upload your images and reverse search them all at once. It also gives you a sorted table with the results, excluding pages from your own domain. This makes it a lot easier to keep track of the sites that have copied your images.
The results are organized so you can conduct a link building campaign. You can email each site and ask them to include an attribution link since they used your image. This is an easy way to get more backlinks to your website and rank even higher in search engines like Google. Even better, all the images you upload are re-scanned every month to find new backlink opportunities.
Conclusion
These are five Google reverse image search alternatives.
So, while you sure should use reverse image search Google or google image reverse search – understand that there are many other options out there. Depending on your unique needs, these “other options” can be a better option.
So, if your first Google search by image or google image search reverse doesn’t return with the desired results, go to the other tools and continue with your search.
With technology so advanced now, it’s easier than ever to search by image – to find out the source of an image, to find other similar images, to learn more about the particular image.
If you liked this post and found it helpful, please share it on your preferred social media.
