Reverse searching images

I made two tutorial videos showing how to reverse search images on iOS and Android using Google browser. There are several approaches and tools you can use, but I chose to show a method that is easy and doesn’t require too many steps.

Android:

iOS (iPad/iPhone)

PC (using Chrome browser)

Google reverse image search is builtin to Chrome browser. Just right-click on the image (or control-click in Mac) and choose “Search Google for image”. Some websites like Instagram don’t allow this.

Also see Google Help page about reverse image search.

Important note: at the time of writing this, Google still gives misleading text suggestion with this “Chernobyl” photo. The results seems to point to Hashima Island in Japan. This photo was actually taken at the Wakayama prefecture in Japan – one of my followers pointed this out and I’ve corrected the related post.

Google reverse image search results – especially the suggested text – should not be trusted. Google simply picks up the most used keywords. You can and sometimes should try different keywords for the image you are searching.

You can also try other reverse image search services like TinEye and Yandex.

Searching for videos isn’t much different. You need to grab one or more frames from the video and perform reverse image search. If you are lucky, the matching video thumbnail is found and you might find the source. Some related useful tools:

1. inVID Verification plugin (is able to extract key frames from various video sources)
2. YouTube data viewer by Amnesty (easy and useful tool for YouTube videos)