Finding copies of your maps / art on the web

[tilt]

There have been a couple of threads concerning other peoples use of our maps / art on the web. If you work is copyrighted you of course want to stop people from using it (at least without permit) but even with open source totally free for use maps you probably want to know if anyone is using your maps anyway and what they are using it for. Probably would like to be credited for your work as well.
Now some people are really polite and ask you if they can use your map and tells you where it will be used and for what purpose. Unfortunatly not everybody are like that. If someone just prints your map for use in their own campaign there really isn't much you can do (and personally I don't care abut that - although it would be nice to know that ones maps are being appreciated), but if someone post your maps online you might have a little chance to find out other than just surfing on thousands of webpages looking

TIN EYE is a reverse image search engine, where you can upload a picture and they then search the web for copies - its still in beta and of course lots of stuff can't be found - if it hasn't been indexed yet or is behind "closed walls" where search engines can't go ... but otherwise you might just find something you look for ... it even finds altered pictures
http://www.tineye.com/

good luck searching

[Redrobes]

When the last thread of this nature came up I ran some of the maps through tin eye and it didn't find any. Have you had any success with it. I expect its very good for some images but it does not seem to be for our maps. There is also google similar images as well which I think is better tho again our maps don't seem to come up all that much on that one either.

[tilt]

they've indexed about 500.000 images now, so there is a long way to go - but they are still working. I haven't tried with any maps myself, but I could imagine that what you say is true for most, until they get further with their indexing. But at least they are "setting a trend" for image recognition so we get more of that... they are also beginning to collaborate with for instance Adobe.. so in 20-30 years... we got them pirates by the throat *lol*

[Redrobes]

LOL - yeah, the day anyone gets the pirates by the throat then wake me up.... It will just change. They would just XOR the image with another standard template file and post that instead. Casual reposters - yeah, pirates - no way. Its a good resource so thanks for posting but lets not get overly excited about its potential to find knowingly ripped stuff. Its a useful tool in the box to search with.

Google images has a search by exact size. Now I am a bit of a nerd so all my images are 1024x768 or 1280 or 2048 etc but I just did a search for a common topic but with exact size match to something bizarre and it gave back just 5 images. So my advice is just make your map an odd but sensible size that no one would be bothered to resample and then google is likely to index it by size and you may have a better shot at getting a match on it even it was renamed to something unsearchable from the original name.

[tilt]

search by size might be a good idea... and yes, i agree about the pirates (i used it more as a common term rather than a profession) those you'll never get...

[Coyotemax]

Well, when I've done searches (I had the tineye firefox plugin already installed) it tells me it's searching through a database of over 1.5 billion images

So far when I try searching images from this site, it seems to only look for the logo image at the top..

I was thinking "hey, they have a submit your site to help speed indexing" link, so I thought it might be a good idea to see about tossing this site over to them - but right now they're only accepting submissions in that manner from sites with more than 1 million images. I know we have a lot of stuff here, but I don't know if we're that big yet

[tilt]

yeah... read that too - but I'm guessing as their server capacity grows they "scale down" and index sites with fewer images, after all, how many sites with more than a million images are there.. .