Topic: How DO People Reverse Image Search?

Like, to double-check to ensure an image is not being stolen from it's artist or such?

A few months back (And literally right as I typed this, to verify), I tried Google Lens on the one image I have uploaded, and it shows as results:
Two 'Rule 34 App', with garbage 'search keyword spamming' titles.
1 'Approvals' from e621.
0 links to my friend's FA page, where the image has existed for roughly 16 or 18 years.

Which leads me to believe that Google Lens is really substandard, and I assume people use something more accurate?

I'm on e6 at all hours of the day, so I figure doing an image search now and again would be a good thing to do.

SauceNAO, Fluffle, and FuzzySearch are my go-tos for reverse image searching furry art in particular.

Ever since they added that lens nonsense to google image search it's been pretty shit, yeah.
Looking under exact matches or visual matches sometimes helps.

Aside from that? There are various other tools like yandex,saucenao, tineye, iqdb and so on. You can probably find a decent few by searching something like "reverse image search" in google.

Though if we're talking about e621 specifically, it's worth noting that underneath the "History" section of any upload there's a "Related" section that has links to some of these tools. Clicking them will reverse image search the upload. You can also see if there are visually similar posts on here.

I use a plugin called "Image Search Options" by Xamayon that adds a new menu to the right click context when you right click an image. It comes with a dozen or so reverse image search engines.
SauceNAO has always been the best imo
Yandex is another one thats always been alright

popoto said:
Ever since they added that lens nonsense to google image search it's been pretty shit, yeah.
Looking under exact matches or visual matches sometimes helps.

Aside from that? There are various other tools like yandex,saucenao, tineye, iqdb and so on. You can probably find a decent few by searching something like "reverse image search" in google.

Though if we're talking about e621 specifically, it's worth noting that underneath the "History" section of any upload there's a "Related" section that has links to some of these tools. Clicking them will reverse image search the upload. You can also see if there are visually similar posts on here.

tineye has personally never worked for me, ive heard somewhere that tineye's image search is based off of the actual data of the image but idk if its true. if it is, that explains why i cant find anything because i do not have the original image stored in their database and instead have a picture that has a years worth of screenshots and reposts behind it.

thegoonguardian said:
tineye has personally never worked for me, ive heard somewhere that tineye's image search is based off of the actual data of the image but idk if its true. if it is, that explains why i cant find anything because i do not have the original image stored in their database and instead have a picture that has a years worth of screenshots and reposts behind it.

I have no idea about how exactly it works but yeah, I've never had that much success with it either. Honestly, I only really use it when the better ones fail.

eightoflakes said:
SauceNAO

woff said:
SauceNAO has always been the best imo

SauceNAO is great but their ratelimits are hell, it's fine for the average user but if you're doing anything more than a few a day (the limit is 100 a day), you're going to run into issues very quickly

eightoflakes said:
Fluffle

Never used this before but it looks solid, and seems to have fairly unrestrictive ratelimits

eightoflakes said:
FuzzySearch

https://owo.fuzzysearch.net is also useful to character owners (and maybe artists?) that want to get notified when their art appears on other sites, I find it quite funny when it tells me my e6 post has been reposted (by me) on bluesky

thegoonguardian said:
tineye has personally never worked for me, ive heard somewhere that tineye's image search is based off of the actual data of the image but idk if its true. if it is, that explains why i cant find anything because i do not have the original image stored in their database and instead have a picture that has a years worth of screenshots and reposts behind it.

I've also never had tineye work, even with what I know should be an exact bit-for-bit match

If you want something for just E621 then https://e621.net/iqdb_queries can do a decent job, I remember being told at one point that there are some optimizations you can apply to make it work better (iirc rescaling to 256 in one dimension and greyscaling? But don't quote me on that), it also has decent ratelimiting (1/2 seconds)

MD5 matching can also help across sites that support it, for instance my own bot which has a reverse image search function first checks the name of uploaded files, if it's an md5 it searches E6 for it, if that fails then it MD5 hashes the file then searches that, then it moves on to other methods

If you go down your left sidebar (assuming standard desktop site), at the bottom is

Related

Sets with this post
Visually similar on E6

Google
SauceNAO
Derpibooru
Yandex
FuzzySearch
Fluffle

Inkbunny

The group in the middle are various search engines e621 supports. However, their usefulness has and will vary over time.

Once SauceNAO was the best, but its not so good anymore in my opinion. Fluffle, once so-so is now an excellent powerhouse more likely to get something than SauceNAO. Google and Yandex are mediocre — sometimes Google can get a few hits, but they're frequently from Rule34 or similar sites, which aren't that helpful, and sometimes they can catch a rare hit on a Russian chan. Derpibooru just sees if a picture can be found on that site. FuzzySearch isn't worth beans in my opinion. Inkbunny is like the Derpibooru search except for being for a different site. Lastly, "Visually similar on E6" is useful for determining if there's a duplicate onsite.

Wow. There's more reverse image searchers than I thought! Thank you for the info and suggestions, everyone.