25 February, 2009

Trace the usage of your picture

A reader Oxe Giolorate ask me how i manage to trace/findout where my illustration was use?
I guess i am just lucky :) When i go to supermarket, i saw a box of chocolate with my illustration printed on top. When i open the newspaper, i found my illustration at the corner of a ad.

But according to a post i read before (from Shutterstock forum), there's a website where we can trace our picture...

TinEye.com
(click on picture for larger preview)

What is TinEye?
TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks.

How does TinEye work?
When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or 'fingerprint' for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in our index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match.
TinEye does not typically find similar images (i.e. a different image with the same subject matter); it finds exact matches including those that have been cropped, edited or resized.

What kind of images can I submit to TinEye?
File type: JPEG, PNG and GIF image are all acceptable.
Image dimensions: TinEye works best with image that are at least 300 pixels in either dimension, but can accept images as low as 100 pixels in either dimension.
File size: 1 megabyte is the maximum file size.
Watermarked images: For best results, visibly watermarked images should be avoided as TinEye may search for the watermark and not the image itself.

What happens to the images I upload to TinEye?
Images uploaded to TinEye are not added to the search index, nor are they made accessible by other users. Copyright for all images submitted to TinEye remains with the original owner/author.
Search images submitted by unregistered users are automatically discarded after one hour. Links to these searches will stop working after one hour, unless another registered user happens to have saved the same image.
Search images submitted by registered users are saved, if search history is enabled in their user Profile. Saved searches are available from the History page, and permanent URL links to any saved search can be bookmarked or shared with friends.

Why can't TinEye find my image? I know it is on the web.
There is a huge and growing amount of images on the web, and TinEye has only crawled a fraction of them so far. We probably missed your image because we have not crawled the website(s) where it appears, or we don't have the latest updates from the site(s). Additionally, some website content is protected by robots.txt or is otherwise uncrawlable. (text & snapshot taken from tineye.com)

For more details please click on link to visit tineye.com

Here's some snapshot taken from TinEye under the Cool Searchs page shows the sample search result. Click on link to view the original web page.

(click on picture for larger preview)

Coming post:
Testing TinEye
I will do a test by using one of my image stock :)

18 February, 2009

My latest Upload :: Blue Easter Bunny

Good news! for those buyer who loves my Easter Bunny. Finally i decided to re-draw it in vector. Who care?! (buyer)....



This time i did some modification on the mouth to make it look better.
Is it? look not different to me...(buyer)

Click on link to visit my gallery @ istockphoto.

09 February, 2009

Cute little pillow from JUSCO

After a long long Chinese New Year holidays, everybody have come back to work (and start to download image stock :)

During this season holiday, a friend of mine come and visit me with a special present....

Yep. A pillow. A little pillow with my Chinese New Year Boy illustration (or something look-a-like :)

click on picture for larger preview

You may found this cute little pillow at the price of RM10.80 (Malaysia Ringgit) at all JUSCO departmental store around Malaysia.