• How to find a similar picture, photograph, image on the Internet. Where are my photos?! Recovering lost data


    It’s quite a meditative and educational activity to look for who and how uses the result of your creativity and intellectual work. Sometimes this pleases, motivates and increases self-esteem, and sometimes it causes anger, because they drag everything that is bad and good, and when they try to point out that it is not good to do this, they say “but we found it in Yandex, so it’s general.” Well, okay, let's leave the showdown with copyright violators to the lawyers, our small business is to periodically look at how and what kind of life photographs live.
    There are several methods that I use, they are slightly different and give different results, so they complement each other perfectly.

    1. Google image search . It would seem that everyone knows about this, but no. Questions constantly arise about how this can be done.

    Option 1.a- just upload a photo from your computer and the results will contain all the images that Google considers similar to yours. There are practically no mistakes, and sometimes there are even highly modified images that were made part of a collage or a background for something. Naturally, the quality of the search depends on the plot.




    Option 1.b- use a browser plugin. I have this one - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/image-tools/
    The point is that after installing the plugin, when you right-click on any image on the Internet, a menu appears that offers different options search. There is a Google search and a couple of other search engines. I tried to search with them all, TinEye gives more or less digestible results - they have their own database different from Google and sometimes they find something that Google did not find, but in general the database is much smaller and there are much fewer results.

    In both the first and second cases, you will have to manually go through all your photos and look for the use of each of them separately. No automation, just routine.

    The search result looks something like this

    Well, then we sort through the mass of found pages and look for some interesting or unusual use. Well, or we’re just glad that at least someone found our work useful and are trying to figure out if the photos were stolen or honestly bought through stock.

    2. Also Google search, but different. In this way, honestly purchased photographs are searched, when using which they did not forget to indicate the author. This method gives much less results than the previous one, but you can find your photographs in some books or articles.
    Everything here is trivial - you just need to enter your name or creative pseudonym in the Google search bar. But in order not to get bogged down in the jungle of results consisting of pages own blog or a portfolio, you need to do it wisely and exclude unnecessary things.
    This is what it looks like search string I have:
    liseykina site: -livejournal.com -shutterstock.com -lori.ru -gettyimages.com -fotolia.com -depositphotos.com -liseykina.ru -liseykina.com

    First comes the pseudonym under which I sell photos on stocks (you are very lucky if it is more or less rare and unique), then the keyword site followed by a list of sites that should be excluded from the search results with a “-” before the name of each. It's simple. As a result, we get a list of sites where your name appears and sometimes it appears in the caption to your photo

    3. Specialized services. On at the moment I know only one thing - they did what I started doing about 5 years ago. But then things didn’t go further than a plugin for the browser, which could be fed a link to the portfolio, and it would search in background pictures and provided a summary of usage. But my plugin died because I was too lazy and uninterested in modifying it following changes in browsers. But the same principle is used in the service Pixsy.com- you feed him a link to your account on photo sites, or upload a photo archive, and in the background he looks for who is using your photos and how. I found more than 10,000 uses of photos in my Flickr portfolio, but it’s not very clear how to view and track all this.

    For those who don’t have enough photo sites, there is the opportunity to feed a link to your site or upload photos in an archive

    Search results

    It’s quite convenient to filter them, for example, you can exclude them from the search individual photos. Or websites. So, I almost immediately said that there is no need to look for matches on photo stocks, and there is no need to show me what was found on the pages of my blog and other friendly sites so as not to clutter the results.

    The coolest feature is the ability to complain about misuse. In the event of a complaint, the Pixsy team will contact the site owner or whoever used your photo "without asking" and demand compensation from them. Naturally, they keep some percentage of what they receive for themselves, but the author still gets a pretty penny.
    However, this does not work with all sites. They use some kind of algorithm to determine which site is commercial and which is not and allow you to demand compensation only from commercial sites. But this does not guarantee results. I sent several complaints to Russian and Ukrainian sites on which my photographs were definitely used without permission - with my copyright or those that were never sold anywhere, to which I received an answer that in these countries (Russia and Ukraine) the compensation program does not work .


    But still the site is very cool and useful. I found a bunch of new things that I couldn’t find on Google with their help. Free version allows you to track up to 5000 photos; if you have a larger portfolio, you will have to pay money.

    But mboyarskov a couple of years ago I described a couple more interesting ways search, including searching for your photos on VKontakte -

    Let's say you have some kind of image (drawing, picture, photograph), and you want to find the same (duplicate) or similar one on the Internet. This can be done using special tools Google search engines and Yandex, the TinEye service, as well as the amazing PhotoTracker Lite browser extension, which combines all these methods. Let's look at each of them.

    Search by photo in Google

    1. Provide a link to the image on the Internet
    2. Uploading a file from a computer

    As a result we get full list similar pictures from the image that was chosen as a sample:

    There's another one good way, working in Chrome browser. While on the page with the image you are interested in, move the mouse cursor to it, right-click and in the tooltip that opens, select “Find image (Google)”:

    You will be immediately taken to the search results page!

    Search by images in Yandex

    With Yandex, everything is no less simple than with Google :) Follow the link https://yandex.by/images/ and click the camera icon in the upper right corner:

    Enter the address of the image on the Internet or upload it from your computer (you can simply drag it to a special area at the top of the browser window):

    The search result looks like this:

    You instantly have access to the following information:

    • What are the online dimensions of the image you uploaded as a sample for searching?
    • List of sites where it appears
    • Similar pictures (modified based on the original one or based on which the algorithm decided on their semantic similarity)

    Many people have probably already heard about online service TinEye, which Russian-speaking users often call Tinai. It is developed by experts in the field of machine learning and object recognition. As a consequence of all this, Tinay is great not only for finding similar pictures and photographs, but their components.

    Indexed database TinEye images has over 10 billion positions, and is the largest in the entire Internet. “Everything can be found here” - this phrase perfectly characterizes the service.

    There is another way to search in one click. By default, the “Show icon” item is activated in the application settings. quick search" When you point at a photo or picture, a round green icon pops up, clicking on which starts a search for similar images - search results for Google, Yandex, Tinay and Bing will automatically open in new tabs.

    The extension was created by our compatriot, whose hobbies are closely related to photography. He originally created this tool to quickly find his photos on other people's sites.

    When you might need it

    • You are a photographer, you post your photos on the Internet and want to see on which sites they are used and where your copyrights may be violated.
    • You are a blogger or copywriter, write articles and want to choose an “unhackneyed” image for your material.
    • What if someone uses your photo from your VKontakte or Facebook profile as an avatar on a forum or a fake one? account in any social network? But this is more than possible!
    • You found a photo of an actor you know and want to remember his name.

    In fact, there are a huge number of cases when searching by photo can be useful. You can give another example...

    How to find the original of a given image

    For example, you have some kind of photograph, perhaps cropped or photoshopped, and you want to find its original, or a version in better quality. How to do this? Conduct a search in Yandex and Google, as described above, or using PhotoTracker Lite and get a list of all images found. Next, follow the following:

    1. The original image usually has larger size And best quality compared to the modified copy resulting from cropping. Of course, you can set a picture to any size in Photoshop, but when you enlarge it relative to the original, artifacts will always be observed. They can be easily noticed even with a cursory visual inspection.
    2. Original photographs often have watermarks indicating the author of the photo (last name, website address, company name, etc.). Of course, anyone can add a watermark to absolutely any image, but in this case, you can look for a sample photo on the website or by the author’s last name, he probably posts his portfolio online somewhere.
    3. And finally, a very simple sign. If your sample photo is black and white (sepia, etc.), and you find the same, but full-color photo, then you obviously do not have the original. much more difficult than converting a color photo to black and white :)

    Article chapters:
    Finding Photos in Windows XP
    Finding Photos in Windows Vista

    The rapid development of “Digital Photography” has increased personal photo archives many times over, in contrast to the era of “Film Photography.” Today, photo archives contain such a huge number of photographs that for many of their owners, the question of searching for photos on a computer is of great importance.

    – this is one of the important parts of working with your photographs. It is as important as their processing, protection, storage or display to viewers. If you can't find any of your photos at the right time, the viewer simply won't see it.

    Showing photographs to the viewer is their main purpose, but first they must be found and prepared. Such work consists of stages, at each of which you have to quickly search for photographs to solve various problems. These tasks determine the purpose of searching for photographs on the computer when preparing them for display.

    Purposes of searching photos on a computer

    The purposes of searching for photos on a computer can be very different, and the choice of how to search for photos will depend on them. The more precisely you set the search conditions for any photos, the more difficult it is to find them.

    After searching your computer for any photos on a given topic, your search goals may expand. For example, from the selected photographs you may need to select the best ones or you may need to distribute them by quality level for subsequent work with them.

    The simplest purpose of a photo search is to search for photos on a particular topic. Such photographs are usually stored in shared folder, and they can be quickly found by the name of this folder. But if photographs on a given topic are stored in different folders computer, searching for them requires more complex ways search and application special programs.

    For example, we have one folder called " New Year" There are no problems finding it and viewing photos in it. But when there are 10, 15 or more such folders, you will have to look on your computer for some New Year’s photo.

    The names of such folders usually differ only in the date in their name, which does not tell us anything. To find one photo among folders of the same type, you need to look through most of them. And so every time with any similar search for photos on the computer.

    The main purpose of searching for photos on a computer, and a very difficult one, is the desire to find a photo with any image. To do this, the search topic is narrowed several times and for each topic there is a separate search and sorting of photos.

    For creative work such as, for example creating a slideshow, you need to look in different folders on your computer for photographs whose elements you want to use for work. In this case, you may need not the images themselves, but their individual fragments or details. This purpose for searching photos on a computer is perhaps the most difficult.

    At long work with photographs, their duplicates are formed, which are usually scattered throughout hard drive computer. To create a convenient photo archive, you need to optimize it, and to do this, you first need to remove all identical photos from its folders. Search identical photos on the computer - this is another important target for finding them.

    In addition to searching for single photos, it is often necessary to select from many folders with photos only those that correspond to one general requirement. For example, by quality, format, resolution or some other characteristics. In any such case, viewing will not give anything. We need other ways to find photos on your computer.

    Whatever your goals for searching photos on your computer, there are always reasons that interfere with this. These reasons depend both on the photographs themselves and on external factors. In any case, you need to know them and select the most suitable ones in advance. effective means search for photos.

    What prevents you from searching for photos on your computer?

    At the initial moment, while there are not many photos, it is easy to search for them. Gradually, the number of folders with photographs becomes larger, and the number of photographs in them also grows, which is no longer in the tens, but in the hundreds. Such folders make it very difficult to search for photos on your computer.

    It's one thing to open and view a folder with several photos, but quite another to view a folder of several hundred photos. large size. When browsing through large folders, it takes time, and searching for photos on your computer can take a long time.

    Another reason that makes it difficult to search for photos on a computer is that the photos we usually take are not very different from each other. Overall they are all very similar. These are the same events, people, plots, etc. The names of the folders of such photos are also not very varied, which makes it difficult to search by their names.

    Finding photos on your computer wouldn't be so difficult if they were stored in one graphic format, for example in . Photos in this format open in almost any graphics program and are relatively small in size, which significantly speeds up their viewing, and hence search.

    To improve the quality of photographs, other, heavier formats are often used - for example, or PSD. Such formats, unfortunately, have problems with viewing, which means that searching for photos in these formats on a computer will be difficult.

    The problems of searching and viewing photos on a computer are related to each other, and they must be solved simultaneously. First you need to combine all folders with photos into one digital photo archive. This will automate the processes of viewing and searching for photos.

    Having a digital photo archive is the first step to creating a convenient system for quickly searching photos on your computer. More details are written about it in the section “Creating a photo archive”. Once the archive is created, you can more effectively use methods to search for photos on your computer.

    Ways to find photos on your computer

    The main way to search for photos on a computer is by folder and file names. To complete this, you need to create a digital photo archive, as mentioned above. A well-thought-out naming system and directory structure allows you to quickly find any photos in the photo archive.

    Most effective way searching for photos on a computer is searching for them by . It allows you to find any photos among a huge number of them. To use this method, each photo must have keywords.

    Photos on the computer must be searched for different queries - by genre, by plot, by location, by time, etc. Therefore, selection keywords for each photo must match all of its possible search queries. One photograph can have more than a dozen such words.

    Another easier way to search for photos on your computer is to use special organizer programs and “Photo Albums”. Such programs allow you to catalog all your photos and then quickly find them in their database.

    The easiest way to find photos on your computer is on the computer itself. These are the capabilities of the Windows operating system and its special service"Search". This method is not as effective as the three previous methods, but it does not require any special effort or special programs.

    Search for photos on your computer using the Search service in each new version The Windows operating system is becoming more and more efficient, but at the same time it has its own characteristics and differences.

    How to quickly search for photos on your computer using the capabilities of operating system search services Windows systems or from other programs, is written in the following chapters of this article:

    Good day.

    I think that those users who have a lot of photographs, pictures, wallpapers have more than once encountered the fact that dozens of identical files(and there are hundreds of similar ones...). And they can take up quite a lot of space!

    If you search for similar pictures on your own and delete them, you won’t have enough time and effort (especially if the collection is impressive). For this reason, I decided to test one utility on my small collection of wallpapers (about 80 GB, about 62,000 pictures and photos) and show the results (I think many users would be interested in this). So…

    Search for similar images in a folder

    Note! This procedure is somewhat different from searching for identical files (duplicates). The program will take significantly more time to scan each image and compare it with others to find similar files. But I want to start this article with this method. I’ll look at the search a little lower in the article. full copies pictures ( it does it much faster).

    In Fig. 1 shows the experimental folder. The most ordinary one, on the most ordinary hard drive, hundreds of pictures were downloaded and uploaded into it, both their own and from other sites. Naturally, over time, this folder grew greatly and it was necessary to “thin out”...

    Image Comparer(scan utility)

    Official website: http://www.imagecomparer.com/rus/

    A small utility for searching similar images on your computer. Helps save a lot of time for those users who work with pictures (photographers, designers, wallpaper collectors, etc.). Supports Russian language, works in all popular Windows OS: 7, 8, 10 (32/64 bits). The program is paid, but there is a whole month for testing to make sure of its abilities :).

    After launching the utility, a comparison wizard will open in front of you, which will guide you step by step through all the settings that you need to set to start scanning your pictures.

    2) On my computer, the pictures are saved in one folder on one disk (so there was no point in creating two galleries...) - so it’s a logical choice “ Within one group of images (galleries)"(I think for many users things are about the same, so you can immediately stop your choice at the first point, see Fig. 3).

    Rice. 3. Select a gallery.

    3) In this step, you simply need to specify the folder (folders) with your pictures that you will scan and search for similar pictures among them.

    4) In this step you need to indicate how the search will be performed: similar images or just exact copies. I recommend choosing the first option, so you will have more copies of pictures that you probably don’t need...

    5) The last step is to specify the folder where the search and analysis results will be saved. For example, I chose the desktop (see Fig. 6)…

    Rice. 6. Selecting a place to save the results.

    6) Next, the process of adding images to the gallery and analyzing them begins. The process takes long time(depending on the number of your pictures in the folder). For example, in my case it took a little over an hour...

    7) Actually, after scanning, you will see a window (as in Fig. 8), which will show pictures with exact duplicates and pictures very similar to each other (for example, the same photo with different resolutions or saved in different format, rice. 7).

    Rice. 8. Results…

    Pros of using the utility:

    1. Freeing up space on your hard drive (and sometimes significantly. For example, I deleted about 5-6 GB of extra photos!);
    2. An easy wizard that will walk you through all the settings step by step (this is a big plus);
    3. The program does not load the processor and disk, and therefore, when scanning, you can simply minimize it and go about your business.

    Cons:

    1. Relatively long time for scanning and creating a gallery;
    2. Similar pictures are not always similar (that is, the algorithm sometimes makes mistakes, and with a degree of comparison of 90%, for example, it often produces slightly similar pictures. In fact, manual “moderation” is indispensable).

    Search identical pictures on disk (search for complete duplicates)

    This option for cleaning the disk is faster, but it is quite “rough”: deleting in this way will only result in exact duplicates of pictures, but if they are of different resolutions, the file size or format is slightly different, then this method It's unlikely to help. In general, for regular, quick “weeding” of the disk, this method fits better, and after it, logically, you can search for similar pictures, as described above.

    Glary Utilities

    22.03.2016

    Let's discuss what tools you can use to restore lost photos from a memory card.

    Digital photography has firmly entered our lives, replacing the leisurely analog process quick creation digital photographs. Just press the camera button or smartphone screen, and the print will be recorded on the memory card. But it often happens that when trying to transfer information from a storage medium to a computer for subsequent processing and storage, some kind of failure occurs, leading to the loss of information. There are different reasons for this - file system errors, power surges, etc. And sometimes, due to careless actions, information is simply erased from the memory card. This is especially offensive when you come back from vacation and discover that all the photographs you took from what seems to be a completely working and reliable medium have somehow disappeared or that it simply refuses to be read, but operating system The PC offers to format it. In the simplest case, it is enough to try to read the same memory card on another computer - this often saves the day. But if such actions are not enough, do not rush to get upset, because the information is not completely lost and can be restored. Several programs, both paid and free, can help in this difficult situation. As a rule, they differ in the capabilities they offer the user to work not only with photo files, but also with documents, as well as with other types of files. We will introduce two of them and take a step-by-step look at the data recovery process.

    In my experience, one of the most best programs data recovery is R-Studio utility(http://www.r-studio.com/ru/), which is also used by many organizations providing this type of service. This multifunctional software is not free - the license costs about $80. It allows you to recover information from a variety of media, and does it very successfully. Most popular ones supported file systems, such as FAT32, exFAT, NTFS, NTFS5, UFS1, UFS2, Ext2, Ext3, Ext4 FS, etc. If the media is not physically damaged, the result of the utility will certainly please you. True, it’s quite difficult to call it simple. By the way, there is a Russian-language interface.

    After connecting the reader with a memory card to the PC, launch the utility. The program interface is replete with tabs and is distinguished by the variety of information displayed.

    Free cheese is not only in a mousetrap

    If paid option If you are not satisfied with data recovery programs, you can always use one of the free ones, of which there are quite a few. But not all of them are worthy of attention. In my opinion, Undelete 360 ​​software (http://www.undelete360.com/ru/index.html) could be a good option. The program, about 2 MB in size, allows you to work with memory cards, flash drives and hard drives. The interface is Russified. Both 32- and 64-bit OS are supported Windows family. The disadvantages of this option include more modest functionality. However, at work this utility It is quite convenient, and besides, it successfully copes with the responsibilities assigned to it.

    Let's consider working with it in practice.

    In principle, the algorithm is similar to the previous program

    Results

    The presented programs serve as tools that can restore necessary information in case of occurrence software errors on memory cards or careless user actions. If there are traces of mechanical damage to the card, then you should contact a specialist.