What the heck is this?

This is a fun embeddable widget that demonstrates the image identification technology behind TinEye, our reverse image search engine.

What you are seeing is several edited variations of the same image. They were all found on the web using TinEye reverse image search, simply by searching for the a version of the original image. We took the results of our TinEye search and put them into this image-flow interface, which allows you to scan through the different images and see the differences between them.

How does TinEye's reverse image search work?

TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. TinEye regularly crawls the web for new images, and we also accept contributions of complete online image collections. To date, there are images in our image database.

When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or 'fingerprint' for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in our index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match.

TinEye does not typically find similar images (i.e. a different image with the same subject matter); it finds exact matches including those that have been cropped, edited or resized.

How do I use the widgets?

Choose the widget you want to play with from the selection on the right. To quickly scan through the TinEye result versions of the original search image, just click the play button. You can also view the image results one at a time, by using the next and previous buttons. The web address below each image is clickable, and will take you to the web page where that particular version of the image was found.

To embed this widget on your website or blog, just click the 'Embed' link, then cut and paste the html.