Searching for Images

A friend recently asked me if I recognized a drawing. It looked like a dwarf or troll of some kind, perhaps from a novel illustration or older comic book. I didn’t recognize it, but was interested in helping, so I did some research into how we could identify the image. The first site I came across was TinEye  (http://www.tineye.com/), a reverse image search. However, TinEye doesn’t have a very large library yet, so the more obscure images are not very likely to be recognized.

I then discovered that you can search Google Images using an image. Just go to http://images.google.com, and instead of typing something in the search box, drag a copy of the image into the search box. You’ll see the search box expand into an upload box, and after a few seconds to upload the image (depending on how large it is), Google will then search for that image. Besides returning any matches, Google will also return images that “look” similar to your image, so similar shape, color, shading method, etc. It wasn’t incredibly accurate with the related images, but it was interesting to see what they thought looked “similar”.

Alas, neither of these options turned up the correct image for our search, but we were able to find the info by pinging some old school comic book fans on Twitter and Facebook – proving that, at least for now, a network of comic book aficionados beats Google in obscure comic book trivia.