This is the first post in a four-part series on using Google Image Search for your wedding blog. This is a bit of a depature from the usual fare here at Favor Craver. I hope my wedding blogger friends will find this useful, and my Favor Craving readers will enjoy the intermission :)

Part One: Find A Photo’s Source with Google Search by Image

Image curation sites like Tumblr, Pinterest and We Heart It yield oceans of beautiful photos, but a photo’s source often gets lost in all the repinning/reblogging/hearting. This might not matter to the casual viewer, but ethical wedding bloggers need to find the original source of a photo before they post it on their own blogs. Finding the original source of a photo can be complicated or impossible if you don’t know where to look. But, when Google updated the Image Search feature this past summer, they added functions that make it much easier to find the original source of any image. Your days of listing “unknown” as a photo credit are over!

Before we go further, let’s make sure you know how to use the Google Search by Image feature. There are two ways to use it.

#1: Go to images.google.com, and drag your image into the search box.

#2: Install the Chrome extension or Firefox extension — sorry Internet Explorer, you lose (again). Once the extension is installed, you can right-click on any image on the web and use it to start a Google image search. This is INSANELY handy.

Now that you’re ready to search, let me show you how I tracked down the source of this gorgeous wedding invitation suite I found on tumblr.

Lovely, isn’t it? I wanted to find out more, but the tumblr blogger left out the source link! I’m sure she didn’t mean to, but I had no idea where the photo came from until…

I used the Google Search by Image extension for Chrome. Let’s check out the search results:

OK, that’s a popular picture, it showed up in many places. So, how do I figure out which one is the source?

Check the file size: Often a reblogged photo gets resized. A bigger image has a better chance of being the original. Papermoss.com posted a 1404 x 956px version of the photo, which is a good sign.

Check the post date: As you can see in this result, papermoss.com posted the invitation suite in posts on July 10, 2010 and November 5, 2010. I found the invitation suite on tumblr in late 2011, so I know that papermoss.com posted it earlier — that’s another good sign that it could be the original.

Since papermoss.com posted a larger photo earlier, I clicked on their link and read about the invitation suite (which, by the way, got featured on Style Me Pretty. Nice!!). The info in the post made me certain that they created it. If I wanted to reblog this image or add it to an inspiration board, I could confidently list papermoss.com as the source.

Extremely popular photos will show up in tons of places, so it may take a bit more digging to discover the original. You can narrow down large batches of search results using the size and date filters on the left. With some refining you can find the original, even if the photo has been reblogged hundreds of times.

Now that you’re well-versed in how to find the original source of a photo, we’ll get a bit more advanced tomorrow and use Google Search by Image to identify mysterious objects! It’s fun :) See you tomorrow!

Part Two: Identify mysterious objects in photos
Part Three: Build inspiration boards with “visually similar”
Part Four: Use Google Search by Image to track your own content on the web