I often see images on Facebook and Pinterest that have snarky comments or no comments at all, and I’d really know where they come from and the actual subjects of the pictures. For example, a few days ago someone posted a photo of a bedroom that’s actually underwater. Awesome. But where is it?
Thanks for sending a link to the photo on Facebook so I could also see it. As you will see momentarily, dear reader, it’s a truly astonishing bedroom setup, though I’m skeptical that I could actually fall asleep in the room. But to lay there and watch the fish? Staggering.
Anyway, let’s stay focused.
While a lot of people know that Google Image Search is a useful tool — I use it quite frequently, actually — few people have figured out that you can actually use it to search for images similar to a specified photo, image or illustration, whether it’s somewhere online or an image you have on your computer.
I’ll show you by demonstrating how I took the photo from Facebook and figured out where it was from…
To start, here’s the original post on Facebook:
The image here is probably big enough, but if you click on it, you’ll see a larger version (along with a lot of funny comments):
At this point, just click and drag the photo off the page and onto your Desktop. Now you’ve got something to work with!
Open up your browser and go to images.google.com. It’ll look the same as it ever does:
See the little camera icon just to the left of the blue search button? Click on it.
Now you’ll see that there are two ways to specify the image you want to search against:
Click on “Upload an image”, then click “Choose File” to proceed:
Once you choose the file and submit it to the search engine, it takes a fraction of a second for lots of useful and interesting results to appear:
And there you go: It turns out that’s a bedroom suite located 16′ below the surface of the ocean on Conrad Maldives Rangali Island, in the Indian Ocean.
Oh, and do check out how the search box itself has changed to show you a tiny thumbnail of the image you just uploaded:
Quite a helpful trick to know about because photos all too commonly take on a life of their own, without anyone ever checking to see what they’re actually about. Now you know how!
What about the photographer who took the image? Photographers’ work is stolen all the time – ie re-posted without even attribution – especially on platforms like Facebook. I tried to use this method to figure out who took an image, who put in all the hard work, financial investment and time involved in creating it – but unfortunately without success. Thoughts?
You raise an entirely legitimate issue, Jul, one that’s the bane of creators everywhere: The Internet changes our relationship with ownership. That’s why I usually try to use my own photos or search for public domain or open source imagery.
Is there a way to find out if the person you are talking to online, the name matches their picture? Sometimes I wonder if they are stealing pictures and using fake names… Is there a way to check that?
Cool info.Never thought of this.
Very cool Dave. I had heard about but wasn’t really sure how to check on a pictures origin before. Thanks for sharing this
There are two alternatives to your procedure.
1. If you have a reasonably modern browser, you can save the Facebook picture as you indicated. Then you can open images.google.com as described. If the Facebook image was saved to your desktop or someplace handy, you can simply DRAG it to the images.google.com search box, and it will upload.
2. If you right-clicked the image on Facebook, you could get the properties of the image, and the URL to the image. Then instead of downloading it from Facebook and reuploading it to Google, you could just give Google the URL to the image.