You should all check out tineye.com.  It is a service that allows the user to instantly right click on any photo and get a report as to where else that picture might have appeared on the internet.  Very useful in checking provider ads for potential photo legitimacy.  Simply right click on the photo and Tin Eye will do the rest.  I have no interest in promoting this other than how it might be additive to your search and review.

Many already know about and use tineye and google images and I guess Lamont uses them when he does his PSA posts ("Hits on photo: ...") but I guess it doesn't hurt to mention them again.  

What if a picture has been cropped, or text added or removed from the original?  Will these search engines find the original, or does it need to be an exact match?

-- Modified on 12/13/2013 11:52:46 AM

they will find ones that were cropped for sure, as for modified I do not know

I'm glad you gents use it! It brings more biz to us girls that use our on pictures!

Both Tineye and Google Image Search will find images that have been slightly - or even rather significantly - altered.  You could take a picture and alter the eye color and narrow the cheekbones and edit out some distracting background details . . . and the picture would still be found by these image comparison programs.  They use an algorithm that matches up colors, image size, orientation, etc., and convert those and other characteristics into a string of numbers and letters (479 3AD 009 14R) and once they've found other photos within a specified range of identifiers, they return those photos as matches.  If a provider (or you) really, really wanted to alter a picture so that neither Tineye nor Google picked up them up as altered photos, it would take about a hour's work to be certain.  I've altered my own photos in the past, and it takes a lot of alteration to defeat the image-match algorithms.