Photo Tip: Finding Copyright Infringement with Google Images and ImageRaider

“Hey Erick, Your photos are all over the web” is what my lovely friend tells me with her gorgeous accent and a concerned tone to her voice. “Yes, I know. I have posted them on galleries like Flickr, 500px and others.” That was my response with my usual calm demeanor. “No! That is not what I am talking about.” she responds as she sends me an email lined with blue links, one after another, after another. after another. My calm demeanor slowly turns into fidgeting as I click on the first link and then the next link, slowly turning into a caldron boiling rage as I come to the last link. At this point I am furious. Why you ask? It is called copyright infringement and it is a serious crime.

Let us put you in a scenario. Let us say you are a carpenter, a very skilled one. Let us say that you like to take your time perfecting your craft, making sure your work is a masterpiece. You work hard on one project and as a result, a brilliant work of art that is above anything else you have ever done before. You place your masterpiece out on front of your shop to sell in hopes that people see it and come in to commission you to do other works of art.

Now let us say some one comes by and snags that masterpiece. They do not try to sell it, they place it in front of their shop and as people walk by they look at the wonderful work. The viewers walk in that person’s shop and ask for his services. They want to have something as amazing as the piece outside that you had made. How would that make you feel? Probably like a caldron of boiling rage huh?

Now you know how I felt after finding tour guide websites that were using my photographs that I have worked hard on spending hours photographing and organizing. Copyright infringement is a serious thing. Instead of focusing on the frustration though, it was time to do something about it. I went ahead and emailed the owners of the website, explained the situation and ask them to either remove the photo or offer some sort of reciprocation for using the photo. Most apologized and removed the photo from their website. Others were kind enough to promote my services as a photographer and linked the photo to my website.

At this point I was curious. I wanted to know if there were other website out there that were also using my photos. So I did some research. To find out the answer to I had did a Google search. With the help of google I stumbled upon two services, Google Images and Tineye. Both are services offer what is called a reverse image search. What that means is that you can upload a photo to tineye or google and will search the internet for other places that are using that same or similar image. I was not a getting a lot of results from tineye, but I was finding google was bringing up a lot website of my images. Most of the websites were ones that I authorized, but some were not.

So how do you use google images? First open up your browser and then head to the website images.google.com. Now originally google images was designed so that you can find images based on what you wanted to find. For example if you wanted to find pictures of tigers, typing tigers would brings you results of pictures of tigers.

The Google images also has this reverse search feature. When you’re on Google images website you’ll see a little camera icon in this in the search bar. Clicking on this camera icon does allow you to start doing the reverse image search.

Two options will show up on the screen one where you can put in the website where your images are hosted the other is a place where you can start uploading your own images. After doing either one the results of places where those photos can found on web will show up.

Well, that seems pretty easy huh? Yes, that is pretty easy if you have 1, 2, 5, or even 10 photos. But now imagine if you have 100 or a couple thousand. Now imagine uploading 1000 photos once every week. That would probably would be an all-day job. Guess what? It is, I know from experience. Probably not the best way you want to spend your time, is it?

There had to be a better solution. That’s where I start to do more investigating. I came across an blog article on the web (sorry I wish I can find it again to give credit). The article was a review of a website called ImageRaider.

What is ImageRaider you ask? ImageRaider is a website that does reverse Google Image searches for you. It works very simply. You upload your photos directly to ImageRaider’s website. Afterwards you set up a frequency of when you want ImageRaider to checks the Internet. For example you can have it search all your images every week, Or every day. After the search is done it then kicks back a result to you via e-mail. Clicking on the email’s link will take you to your account on ImageRaider’s website where you can see all the pages that are using your images. It is a very handy tool. What is also handy is that ImageRaider not only searches Google Images, but also Bing and Yandex (don’t worry I do not know what Yandex is either).

When you sign up for ImageRaider you get 300 credits to start with. That allows you to do Google Image searches for a few photos for a long period of time if you are doing a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly search. If you have a lot of photos, then it will burn through pretty fast. You can purchase more credits as you need them.

The tool has streamlined my weekly routine of looking for copyright infringement on the web. In what used to be an all day or 2 day process has now taken hours in a day. (Depending how easy it is to contact the owner of the website or webservice.) ImageRaider can help many photographers out there. Check them out.

What do you think of Copyright infringement? Have you been a victim? Perhaps all images on the web should be free? Tell us what you think Leave a comment below, send me a tweet on twitter, or post on my facebook. Heck even send us a message. Let me know so I can help. Subscribe to our newsletter to gain even more tips. Happy travels