How does TinEye work?

TinEye uses image recognition to find matches to your search image. It does not use image names or any metadata associated with your search image. When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or 'fingerprint' for it using image recognition, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in our index to find matches. 

We create and update our index by crawling the web. We never add your image to the TinEye index and we only keep your image briefly in order to show you your results.

TinEye’s image recognition uses robust and accurate image comparison and even finds images that only partially match to your search image.

TinEye does not typically find similar images (that is, a different image with the same subject); it finds image matches including those that have been cropped, edited or resized.

Learn more about how TinEye works, or get an overview of our technology.