There are billions of images, photos available on the Internet. Many of these photos are of incredible landscapes, waterfalls, deserts and forests. You can find few awesome photos on the web by searching for “nature wallpapers”. The wallpaper websites are full of such kind of images. You may find a very cool picture of a site on a social networking website shared by your friend or on a blog where you are reading an interesting article. Well there are unlimited possibilities of getting attracted by an image while you are on the Internet. The problem is that in most of the cases you didn’t know the name of the place in the image, picture. In this tutorial we will learn how we can find out the place where the picture was taken. There is no guarantee that the tutorial will work but we can try at least.
Using Google’s Image Search
Google’s Image search allows us to upload an image and Google tries its best to find out relevant images. If it is a well known photograph then Google will display the name of the place (or at least something relevant).
You can drag and drop the image on Google.com but this technique doesn’t work in Internet Explorer. If you want to enjoy this feature then you should be using Firefox or Chrome. The following tutorial will work on most of the modern web browsers.
- Step 1: First of all go to images.google.com.
- Step 2: Click on the camera icon at the end of the search bar.
- Step 3: A window will appear as a result of step 2, asking you to upload the image or write the URL to the image.
If the picture, image is on your computer then you can upload using the upload option otherwise you can directly give the URL of the image. Note that you need to give the URL of the image, not of the whole page. To get the URL of an image right-click on the image and click copy image URL in chrome and right-click > copy image location in Firefox. Then paste this location/URL in the URL box.
- Step 4: Click Search when you are done with the image. After that Google will search for the image in its database and will show you results if find any. For the sake of example I searched for a Taj Mahal picture and in return I got this search page:
Google was very quick to find the place in the picture.
Other Options
Besides Google’s Image search there are other image search engines that can be used to reverse search for the image. One of these search engines is TinEye. This search engine is, however, less powerful than Google’s Image search but you can try this out if Google search failed to find what you are looking for.
Conclusion
Reverse image search is sometimes very important to find the original photographer or the place in the photo. Besides Google’s comprehensive search for the text in websites, it also gives us the ability to perform a reverse search for images.