This is part four of a four part series. You can find links to the previous installments at the bottom of this post.

Part Four: Use Google Search by Image to Track Your Own Content

Now for the final installment in the series! Since Monday, you’ve learned how to use Google’s Search by Image to find the original source of a photo, solve photographic mysteries, and find pics for your inspiration boards. All very handy when you’re curating content for your wedding blog, but what if you’re a content creator?

Google image search is awesome for tracking your own work as it spreads around the web. Now that you know how to perform a simple image search, you should make it a habit to search your most popular or unique image content periodically. After you browse the results of your simple image search and see your images reblogged and praised by your fellow wedding bloggers, it’s time to refine your search.

With an advanced image search, you can focus on finding the sinister variations of “reblogging”: the robotic scraper blogs, the etsy copycats, and the obnoxious “new wedding planner passing off other planners’ work as their own in portfolio photos” (yes, it’s 2011 and this actually still happens).

For this example, I’m going to use a photo from Style Me Pretty, a gigantic blog that no doubt spends a gigantic amount of time battling infringement. This photo is from one of their most popular posts of 2011.

A basic image search for this photo yields tons of hits. Most of them are totally innocent reblogs of the photo. To zero in on problematic uses, I’m going to use the “describe image here” feature to refine the results with text from the original post. Why? In most cases a content scraper will take everything from a post, not just the photo. Also, human bloggers who swipe other bloggers’ content are unoriginal types who tend to copy or lazily paraphrase the original. An image search that includes text from the original post will help catch both varieties of pests.

Here’s the first paragraph of the original post on Style Me Pretty:

When I add that first sentence into the image search, I get lots of results. Again, most are innocuous, but on page two, I find something suspicious. Check out the 4th result in this pic. See how the all of the text is bold? It’s because it matches the text portion of my search exactly. (I’ve blurred out the other results and the link to this site to protect the innocent and shun the not-so-innocent):

Yep, that’s the whole first sentence of the post, and when I click in I see the entire post scraped and reposted on some bizarro website. If that was my post, I’d now have to decide how to deal with the scrape. In this specific case, the offending blog is hosted by Blogger, so I could use Google’s copyright infringement report form to get the post taken down. It’s not always so easy to take down a scraper, though, and often it’s not worth the trouble. If you’re posting a lot of popular content you’ll have to pick your battles or you’ll waste a lot of time trying to chase down robots.

Of course, image search is not the only way to track down your content as it spreads around the Internet — a text-only search yields different scraper results for this post — but it’s a handy tool to wield, especially if your creations are photo-heavy or illustrated.

I hope you’ve found this series useful, and I welcome your comments and feedback! You can find the rest of the series linked below. I’ve also included some recommended reading: more information on using Google’s image search, and discussion & commentary on the legal and ethical considerations of reblogging/pinning photos.

The first three parts of this series:

• Part One: Find a Photo’s Source with Google Search by Image
• Part Two: Identify Mysterious Objects in Photos
• Part Three: Build Inspiration Boards with “Visually Similar”

Further Reading:

Google Search by Image in depth, from Google

“3 Ways to Use Google’s New Search by Image for Link Building” from SEOMoz

“Will Pinterest be sued by photographers like Napster was sued by musicians?” - A blog post by photographer Elizabeth Halford about the mixed feelings professional photographers have toward photo curation sites like Pinterest.

A discussion on Quora about Pinterest and copyright

This is part three in a four part series on using Google Image Search for your wedding blog. You can find links to the first two posts and check out the topic of the upcoming post at the bottom of this post.

Part Three: Build Inspiration Boards with “Visually Similar”

In the first two posts of this series I focused on using Google’s Search by Image as a time-saving, problem-solving tool, but today I’m going to introduce another way to use it that’s addictive and, honestly, time consuming. If you’re ready to get dangerously lost in inspiration board creation, let’s go!

For this example, I’m going look for photos to use in an inspiration board built around this image from Elizabeth Anne Designs:


I love the vibrant colors and styling of this reception table. Let’s see what I get when I search by image with this photo and click on the “Visually Similar” link in the search results.



Hm… ok… kinda weird. And not terribly useful, unless I wanted to make an anime inspiration board. Apparently I need to give Google more information about what I want to see. When I enter “yellow teal wedding” in the search box, I get this result:


Oh, now that’s more like it! And that’s just page one. There are hundreds of thousands of results for this search. Luckily the first few pages are nice and relevant; I could build an inspiration board from the first two pages of results alone. For even more variety, I can switch around the words in the description. “Teal yellow wedding”, “wedding yellow teal” and “wedding teal yellow” all yield similar but different results, giving me tons of photos to choose from to build a board.

Now you may be wondering, wouldn’t I get these results just by typing “yellow teal wedding” or one of its variations into a regular Google image search? Let’s try that:


That’s a lot of inspiration boards. Pretty, but not helpful if I’m planning to make my own inspiration board. The results I got when I searched with an image are linked to full-size images and tailored to the image I chose to start my board. Of course, if you’re building a board with photos found through image search you’ll want to double check the photos to make sure you’re crediting the right source, but you already know how to do that ;)

If I haven’t lost you down the inspiration-board-making rabbit hole I’ll expect to see you here tomorrow, when we’ll cover how to use Google Search by Image to find where your own content has spread on the web, for better or for worse.

Part One: Find the original source of a photo with Google Search by Image
Part Two: Identify mysterious objects in photos
Part Four: Use Google Search by Image to track your own content on the web 

This is part two in a four part series on using Google Image Search for your wedding blog. You can find a link to the first post and check out the topics of the upcoming posts at the bottom of this post.

Part Two: Identify Mysterious Objects in Photos

Now that you’ve learned how to use Google Search by Image to find the original source of a photo, you’re ready to move on! Did you know you can also use image search to solve mysteries?

Let’s say you’re browsing Pinterest for indoor wedding venues. In your search you find this amazing venue, and you’re dying to know where it is.

But, the pinner didn’t say where it is and there’s no source link. You could ask the Pinterest user, but it can take a while to hear back and the pinner might not know. Search by Image knows!

Search by Image needs just 0.16 seconds to tell you that this breathtaking venue is the Grosse Point Academy Chapel. Wonderful!

Ready for a bit of more advanced sleuthing? Last summer, I took this photo of a flower I didn’t recognize.

Searching with this photo as-is didn’t give me useful results. No surprise, really. There are no other copies of my photo online for Google to reference, and the image has a lot of background “noise” from the greenery. Here’s what I did to help improve the search results.

Crop the photo tightly around the mystery object: I cropped the image, cutting out most of the greenery in the background. When I put the cropped photo into image search, I got this result:

OK, so none of those are my flower. But I was just one step away from the answer…

Describe the image: I typed “flower with blue purple green center” in the search box and searched again. With a description filled in, Google knew what to focus on. This second search gave me this:

Hey, there it is in the top row! I hover my cursor over the photo:

And I see that I have found the passiflors caerulea, a.k.a blue passion flower.

Now that you know how to find photo sources and solve photo mysteries, you’re ready to start getting creative! Tomorrow, we’ll get into using the “visually similar” feature to create amazing inspiration boards.

Part One: Find the original source of a photo with Google Search by Image
Part Three: Build inspiration boards with “visually similar”
Part Four: Use Google Search by Image to track your own content on the web 

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