Tin Eye – Reverse Image Search

tineye As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about copyrighting images, I had a Tweet from Schofields in UK (they provide holiday home insurance for UK cottages & overseas property and blog on holiday letting, travel and property news).  They mentioned that its possible to also check and see if other people are using your photos illegally and it reminded me of a link that was shared at the Blizzard Internet Google Boot Camp last week.

Tin Eye is a reverse image search engine. You can input an image URL and it will deliver information on where an image came from, how it is being used,  and if modified versions of the image exist.

On the continued topic of content theft, and if you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know I was particularly peeved yesterday to find one of my best Google rated articles appearing under a different name promoting an Orlando resort.  Here’s another article that has some useful information on how to deal with content theft.

Let me know if you have any more tips on dealing with this issue.

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Heather Bayer

  • Hi Heather,

    Thanks for the mention and Tiny Eye tip, looks useful.

    Copyright infringement is annoying! Many vacation rental & cottage owners take a lot of time taking photos and even hire professional photographers. Rightly so, as photos are one of the key influencers in the holidaymakers decision process.

    Often photos are stolen by ‘lazy’ owners who copy photos off vacation rental portals and put them on their own advert. Usually they are competitors in your area, even on the same complex, so they are easy to spot. If this happens, simply contact the rental site with your grievance and the duplicate photo will usually be removed.

    When your content is scraped, contacting the offender can yielded no response. I wouldn’t worry too much unless the scraped content is affecting business. Google can usually identify the original source. It’s also useful to always link back to the original source within syndicated articles.

    If you want to pursue the perpetrator, this is one strategy http://www.linkspiel.com/2011/02/copyright-infringement-links/

    Regards

    Phil