All photographers, artists, designers and other creatives have the concern that images that they post on the web, and particularly on social media sites, will be stolen and re-used by other people. You can watermark your images, embed tracking information in them but there is another alternative – reverse image search.
Reverse image search allows you to quickly find other places an image occurs on the web. You can then take action as appropriate.
Plugins exist for most major browsers that will do the reverse image search for you. Here are some:
If you do a search on “reverse image search” you will find more.
All these work by allowing you to do a right-click on an image and then do a reverse search.
Once you find them you can do various things, from contacting the person who has used the image and asking them to remove it (often successful) to reporting the matter to the site owner or taking legal action. Facebook has a process for handling takedowns, as do most other social media sites.
