Unfortunately, this sort of thing happens all the time these days. Somebody will find an image online funny, say a comic or a piece of artwork, and want to share it. They then take the time to download the image, crop off any identifying logos or watermarks, and then upload the image to imgur or min.us. The creator has lost all credit and won’t benefit from the traffic (ad revenue or credit/recognition) that their creation is generating. This is often the primary source of income. It also prevents people from being able to easily find more of the artist’s works. Some of the funniest comics required doing some digging and now I subscribe to their RSS feeds. It’s doing a disservice to the creator and other viewers to remove this information and to not provide a link to the source.
This very thing happened just last week. I saw this comic on Imgur, linked to from Reddit, and had a hard time finding the source. Fortunately, TinEye was able to easily answer that question for me.
TinEye is a cool reverse image search. You upload an image to search for matches or provide the URL to an image or webpage, and it will search over a billion images and provide you with a link to those results.
The results will provide you with the URL to the source and descriptive information like the dimesions of the image and its file size. You can also click a ‘Compare’ button for a pop-layer to appear that will allow you to quickly toggle between the image you searched with and a specific result.
You can create a free account with TinEye for some added benefits, like permanent permalinks to search results (permalinks for guests are limited to 72 hours making them more like tempolinks, but I digress).
Here we have it. As a result of this search in TinEye, I’m fairly confident this is the source of the comic over on DeviantArt.
TinEye also has plugins for Firefox, Chrome, IE, and Safari that allow you to either right-click on an image and send it directly to TinEye or a bookmarklet that you click click to send the page to TinEye for even faster searching.
Check out TinEye. It’s cool technology, similar to Google Goggles, with more images being included in its searching each month. Remember to give credit where credit is due. TinEye could even save you money from legal fees from accidentally using a copyrighted image.