It came, it made its presence felt and now millions of users across the globe are ‘pinning’ their interests on it. Of course, we are talking about none other than Pinterest, another potential social networking giant in the making. However, even with its exponentially growing popularity, Pinterest has not been without its fair share of controversies, the most leading among them being the dissemination of images without the users having a clue about the image sources when they repin them, which eventually makes them miss out on attributing the image from its original creator or propagator. This has made Pinterest the target of some scathing criticism from a number of online image libraries.
Moreover, many users may also want to find out the origin of a particular image because of their keen interest in what it depicts, or if they are in search of a better quality resolution for it. The good news is that finding the source of an image is nothing too complicated, with a number of ways available for people to locate it. First let’s discuss the shorter ways to do it, which will be your automatic choice in all likelihood:
- TinEye: TinEye calls itself a ‘reverse image’ search engine. The process of finding out an image source is pretty simple on the website. Once on the page, you have the option to either upload the image from your computer system or enter the URL of the image itself or page where you found it. The only downside is that TinEye may not yield you a result 100 percent of the time. Still, it is a good tool to find out the origins of images, especially from well known sources. Take for example this picture of the lead actors from the movie Fight Club, which was pinned here on Pinterest and then uploaded to TinEye as a test.
The page also shows a list of pages where the image appears.
- Src-Img: Src-img is basically a bookmarklet which assists users in finding the image sources by interfacing with Google Images. After logging on to the website, details are given on the upper left corner of the browser about how Src-img works, according to which users are required to drag a link provided on the website to their bookmark bar. Once the users are on the page on which they want to find the image sources, they need to click on the bookmark of Src-img they earlier created, following which question marks appear on every image on the page.
Clicking on the question marks opens a new window, providing a list of sources where the image might have been taken from and listing the most likely source on top.
And now, let’s discuss the relatively lengthier but much simpler way of finding the source webpage of an image. First, download or drag the Pinterest image whose original website you wish to find out, like the picture of this Corvette pinned by a user.
Next, go to Google Images and drag the downloaded image from the folder where it is saved to the Google Images search bar. As soon as you drop the image on the search bar, it will start searching for its origin.
Finally, the search engine will reveal the links from where the image is most likely to have been taken.
These tools to locate the web origins of an image will come in handy not only on Pinterest but also on websites such as Tumblr, where you can now easily attribute an image to the rightful owner.
Courtesy: The Graphics Fairy
