Idée Inc's awesome little thingie allows you to search for a specific image and find it's duplicates on the net. It's, what they call, a reverse image search engine. It's engine will scan an image of your choice (that you upload or link to), making a unique map out of it. It will then find all images corresponding to your unique "fingerprinted" image. It means that even if someone has stolen your photo, cropped it and made it b&w, the engine will still be able to find it. Extremely useful for keeping an eye on where your work is being used, be it a logo or a stock image.
When I first tried it they had a 4 million images database. Quite small if you think about the amount of data out there. Now they're up to 1 billion..so I'd say things are going well.
I've already found a few of my photos tossed around blogs..no credit back, of course. A friend of mine - very talented photographer - has found one of her portraits being selled as a tiny cell-phone wallpaper with some text on it, on different sites...
So, visual artists from all over the world - it is time to get empowered! As for art rippers: beware, a new era has begun!
Edited by RubyBlue, 20 March 2009 - 02:25 PM.
