TinEye: Reverse Image Search, Crawler and Image Removal
TinEye finds where an image appears online with its own crawler and image index. What it documents about crawling and how to remove your images.
TinEye is a reverse image search engine that shows the web pages where an image appears. It builds its own image index with a web crawler, so the images on your site can be in it. If you want an image removed, take it off your site first and then send a removal request.
Who runs TinEye
TinEye is a product of Idée Inc., a company in Canada (TinEye services site). The same company sells image recognition APIs, for example the TinEye API and MatchEngine.
How TinEye finds images
TinEye creates and updates its index by crawling the web. For each image, it makes a compact digital signature and compares that signature with the images in its index. TinEye uses image recognition, not keywords, metadata or watermarks (What is TinEye?).
The help article About the TinEye index gives these details:
- The index holds billions of images, and the crawlers add to it all the time.
- TinEye crawls stock photo sites and image collections, such as Wikipedia, Flickr and NASA, more often than other sites.
- TinEye does not usually add images from social media sites to its index.
If TinEye does not find an image that is on your site, TinEye says that its crawler has not yet visited that page (source). The help center describes no way to submit a site for crawling.
Each result shows a first found date. This is the date when TinEye’s crawler first saw the image (source). It is not the date when the image was first published.
Images that people upload to search
TinEye says that it never adds a search image to its index. It keeps the image for a short time to show the results (source).
Remove your images from TinEye
- Remove the image from the web page where TinEye found it.
- Send a request through the TinEye image removal form.
TinEye does not remove an image that is still on the website (source). A removal from TinEye does not remove the image from other websites. For removal matters, TinEye gives the address [email protected].
Block the TinEye crawler
The TinEye help center does not name the user-agent string of the crawler or a robots.txt token. If you want to block it, first find its exact user-agent string in your server logs. Then add a robots.txt group or a server rule for that string. For the general steps, see how to find and block crawlers on your site.
TinEye does not say what happens to images that are already in its index when you block the crawler. To remove those images, use the removal steps above.