TinEye is a reverse image search engine. This means that you can either upload an image from your computer, or enter in the URL of an image - and this tool will find both exact-match and altered (cropped, colour adjusted, resized, heavily edited or slightly rotated) copies of your image.

For webmasters: This will prove to be an extremely useful tool, when attempting to ensure that your designer is delivering fully unique work.

It's like Copyscape for photos! I'm surprised that it works -- that's pretty scary technology.

Their web site says "TinEye finds exact and altered copies of the images that you submit, including those that have been cropped, colour adjusted, resized, heavily edited or slightly rotated."

If the technology works on the bitstream level, you might be able to evade it by converting the images from one file format to another. If it works with some type of image analysis, it could be effectively unbeatable. Their cool search examples certainly make the technology appear impressive.

Of course, offending webmasters can simply block the TinEye web crawler in their robots.txt file.

Interesting. I think Google Image search uses some kind of image recognition tech as well, but this seems far more sophisticated and for a niche purpose.

Amazing and scary and unbolivable.

What a great tool.