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Marketers Toolbox: TinEye

Note: The Marketers Toolbox series teaches our readers about new technology we're using (or experimenting with) that proves to be useful, productive, or just plain entertaining. As a marketer's secret weapon, Setup believes that the tools we use are vital to our success, thus, a marketer's toolbox is truly one of our most important resources.

It's insanely easy to search for the perfect photo online, but if you're not subscribed to paid stock photography sites like Getty Images, iStockphoto, or Dollar Photo Club (recently acquired by Adobe Stock), you might be accidentally committing copyright infringement without even knowing it.

TinEye is a reverse image search, where you can upload an actual image or the URL of an image to find its original source. This can help you to make appropriate attributions, or even avoid using the photo altogether if it's proprietary.

While free for individual usage, TinEye offers corporate clients the option to continuously and automatically track where their images appear on the web. If your company publishes any kind of patented visuals, wouldn't you want to know how often it's being reused?

Free image resources like Unsplash and Picjumbo have made it easier to pull beautiful photos for stock purposes, but in using these resources, you run the risk of overuse –– you may notice that you're seeing website photos in someone else's white paper, or vice versa.

TinEye's image search technology can be implemented on a consumer level as a browser plugin for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Opera.

On the enterprise level, big brands like Adobe, Discover, Groupon, and Kayak use TinEye's Commercial API product and TinEye Alerts (still in Beta) to save time and money that they'd otherwise waste searching individual images for infringement.

Their pay structure allows companies to purchase a search bundle that starts at $200 for 5,000 image searches and taps out at $10K for 1M image searches.

This proudly independent, privately held company is "made in Canada with love, and caffeine," and is getting tons of buzz in Wired, TechCrunch, Fast Company, and BBC news!

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