One for Artists and Photographers

Tue
Jul 22 2008 11:49pm

One for Artists and Photographers

Terry Karney let me know of the existence of Tin Eye; an image search engine with a difference. This one doesn't search for pictures of kittens; you give it a picture, and it finds copies of that picture. The copies can be found even if they've been rotated, used in a collage, and so on.

The site is in beta, and they point out that they've only indexed a fraction of the images on the net. Nevertheless, I found that art and photography of mine is being used without credit all over the place. Obviously I knew that was likely to be the case, but here is the rub; I'm an indifferent photographer and my art is highly specialised. My guess is that if your art and photos are more usable than mine, they'll be nicked more.

Some of the uses don't trouble me; if you want to crop a picture of mine for an 100 pixel icon, I can live with that, though I'd like a credit. But whole pictures, large resolution, with no credit and a new watermark? Selling a photo of mine as a t-shirt? Putting photos of my kids in a reel of funny photos? I found all of those through Tin Eye, and I'm not sure I want information to be quite that free.

Anyway, it struck me that quite a lot of you might also be interested to find out who's using your stuff too. It's a private beta at the moment, but I emailed them and requested an invite, and got one within hours.

19 comments

1. ErictheTolle

view all by ErictheTolle | Tuesday July 22, 2008 09:14pm EDT

Aside from plagerism detection, the main use I can think of for this system is to find the original artist for a picture or drawing.

This appeals to me, because time and again I've seen a picture, gone "Gee that's nice, I'd like to see more from this artist", and been flummuxed, because I can't find the artist's name.

2. dd-b

view all by dd-b | Tuesday July 22, 2008 10:16pm EDT

Thanks for the tip. I'm not sure I really want to know :-(. But I've put in a request. Should be interesting, anyway.

3. orchard

view all by orchard | Tuesday July 22, 2008 10:19pm EDT

Yeah, me too. Thanks Alison.

4. Galoot

view all by Galoot | Tuesday July 22, 2008 11:29pm EDT

It works as advertised. I think. Nobody ever steals my stuff. :(

5. orchard

view all by orchard | Tuesday July 22, 2008 11:37pm EDT

Don't count on it. I was uploading some fairly well known, well distributed art works and they all came up negative.

6. neutronjockey

view all by neutronjockey | Wednesday July 23, 2008 02:02am EDT

Hmmm, my comment earlier was either eaten, edit, or I finger-cheesed and didn't submit.

I had been wondering if I photocollaged some well-known art whether or not I could booger the system or find a threshold ...just for curiosity sake. I mean, I can't imagine publicly available software algorhthims being that powerful or precise..

7. AlisonScott

view all by AlisonScott | Wednesday July 23, 2008 03:37am EDT

@neutronjockey: I did try this both ways; I plugged in two collages of mine based on really quite famous originals; Middle Plokta and Doctor Plokta checks for Millennium Bugs; it found the original in both cases. For my most pirated image, it found resizings, crops, reflections, and one collage use.

However, it did not find the originals of pictures that I'd used and changed drastically as collage elements. And it didn't find any matches for the picture in this post; I suspect the collage search only works to find the search picture as an element in another picture, not to find the individual elements.

8. neutronjockey

view all by neutronjockey | Wednesday July 23, 2008 04:10am EDT

Alison, while I don't condone image pirating---I can see why the squirrel is frequently borrowed: it is 'teh kyoot.'

I suspected it wouldn't find individual elements, especially not to the extend at which I would photochop them.

9. AlisonScott

view all by AlisonScott | Wednesday July 23, 2008 05:10am EDT

@neutronjockey: the squirrel is frequently pirated because it appears in the first three image hits on the Google search 'squirrel'. It is not by a very long chalk the best photo of a red squirrel on the interweb, but it's an easy adequate one for the sort of lazy web designer who is stealing their art in the first place.

10. chawley650

view all by chawley650 | Wednesday July 23, 2008 06:16am EDT

Hello Alison,
Thank you for providing another "Gibson moment": a present datum which all too soon arrives to put a kink in an envisioned future.

William Gibson posited a visual-comparison search engine as just-emerging technology in Pattern Recognition, set in a nearly-contemporary post-9/11 era.

-- attributed to Alvin Toffler

11. GUDsqrl

view all by GUDsqrl | Wednesday July 23, 2008 06:25am EDT

Eeep. I do sometimes help myself to other people's pictures for lj icons and so forth. I'm a bad squirrel. (not this one tho--this was drawn for me by a friend!)

That said, I've found .htaccess pretty successful in defeating those sites that just strip any and all images posted on lj, frex, without attribution. A friend of mine who found a site using a photo of hers--and pulling it straight off her server--put up something, hmm, controversial using the same url.

If someone's exploiting your photo(s) for commercial purposes, probably an idea to contact them and ask for your share of the income.

12. TFlynn

view all by TFlynn | Wednesday July 23, 2008 07:45am EDT

Thanks for the info Alison,

I am waiting on my request to be honoured so I can take a peak at the site and see what is going on. Not sure at this point in my "career" if I would put up too much of a fuss about finding any of my images or not. Right now I can use all the views possible as long as credit is givin where credit is due.

13. AlisonScott

view all by AlisonScott | Wednesday July 23, 2008 08:03am EDT

@GUDsqrl well, icons are 100px square typically; it's hard to argue that you're seriously damaging the commercial value of the item. The key thing there is to credit the artist or the place where you got it from. Every time I've asked if I could use an icon I've been told 'sure, I have no idea where it came from though'; I try to credit the ones I use where possible.

Someone backlinked to my site for an eBay auction a little while ago; I spotted it from my server logs but by then the auction had finished. If I'd been on time I would indeed switch out the pictures (probably for one that wasn't actually rude but, eg had a picture of a horse's backside and said 'don't buy stuff from people who steal their ebay images', that sort of thing)

The problem with asking for an income share is that these sites are all foreign. Even for Dutch and Swedish sites it's probably more trouble than it's worth, but for Russian sites it's clearly a hiding to nothing. And asking for a share of the income wouldn't work well because it would be pennies; their method is to have loads of different photos available. Running takedown on all these is too much like hard work.

14. GUDsqrl

view all by GUDsqrl | Wednesday July 23, 2008 08:07am EDT

*nods*

I like the horse idea.

15. kaolin

view all by kaolin | Wednesday July 23, 2008 08:17am EDT

Lots of folks "borrow" images from erif.org. Those dynamically change to ads for GUD if the referer isn't blank or from a site I post to. ;)

16. dd-b

view all by dd-b | Wednesday July 23, 2008 08:47am EDT

Got accepted in this morning.

This is interesting. It didn't recognize that this was a cropped portion of this (but found instances of both out on the web, so I know they're both in its index).

For people who talk about recognizing an element used in a collage, I have to say that this counts as a critical failure.

Are the links to searches sharable?

17. pablodefendini

view all by pablodefendini | Wednesday July 23, 2008 08:51am EDT

oh, this looks interesting... just requested an invite, looking forward to playing around with it.

18. vicki

view all by vicki | Wednesday July 23, 2008 09:00am EDT

.htaccess will help you deal with hotlinking, yes. It won't help if someone grabs one of your photos off the Web, uses it as the main feature of their album cover, and the album cover is displayed on their own site, or their record company's.

That may sound odd and unlikely, but it happened to a photographer I know; it took him a bit of time and effort to get paid for that obviously commercial use of his work.

19. Bruce-Arthurs

view all by Bruce-Arthurs | Wednesday July 23, 2008 04:47pm EDT

I was looking for something to use as an icon on this site, and found something on stock.xchng (a free stock photo site) that was JUST what I wanted, and could be shrunk down to icon size without ill effect.

Except that the photographer wanted his name mentioned if the photo was used anywhere, and THAT couldn't be shrunken down that far. Damn.

So I went with the generic clip-art (via Microsoft Word) of a Siamese cat you should see up there in the corner of this post. I'll probably change it later.

(I've used photos from stock.xchng before, on my blog, and have always tried to remember to give photographers a credit line, and a link if available.)

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