Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

Saw this earlier today as part of Robert Scoble’s visit to Microsoft for the Pro Photo Summit. It’s a search engine called TinEye. The concept behind it is that TinEye uses a sophisticated algorithm to find “photo footprints”. I already signed up for a free trial, and the results are pretty cool. The way it works is, you upload a photo or provide a URL for an image, let’s say the Eiffel tower. TinEye takes that image and compares it to images it has already indexed and provides matches. The cool part though is that these matches don’t have to be identical copies, they can also be partials. So you might get images of the Eiffel tower that are not color matched, there is copy over the Eiffel tower, the Eiffel tower is distorted in some way, or the the Eiffel tower is only in the background, cropped, and only partially seen.

TinEye says that it’s picture index is extremely limited at this point, but I think if they can hook into the likes of some of the larger photo warehouses (Getty, iStock, Flickr, etc.) this could really become a powerful tool. If nothing else, than to enforce copyright infringement for professional photographers who are constantly having their work reused online without their consent.

Check out the video below for more info:

It appears my photography skills are getting better and better these days.

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I’m planning on taking a course through the Chicago Park District this fall, but if you have any recommendations, I’d love to hear them.