Spotting copyright violations

How’s that? You can click on the pic and choose search in Google.

That’s not an option anymore, it’s been replaced by Google Lens.

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Thanks! I just checked to see if it worked using the first image that came up on the Explore page. Funnily enough it turned out to be a copyright violation.

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The Google Lens feature replaced the right click option. Kind of. Google Lens immediate results aren’t as good (for finding duplicates) as the Google Image search.

But, if you scroll to the bottom of the search results in Google Lens (I’m on desktop/Windows/Chrome), you can find a section that says “Didn’t find what you were looking for?” Retry with Google Images." and a bright blue [Try it] button.

As @arboretum_amy said, images.google.com does still work

And you can delete Google Lens which will cause the default search option to be Google Images.

More detail here: https://petapixel.com/2022/01/12/how-to-restore-reverse-image-search-with-right-click-in-chrome/

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I’m on the latest Chrome version and I can do that.

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That option to restore the default to Search by Image, instead of Lens - is now gone.

I try to avoid Chrome, but perhaps there are extensions you could add that would replace the Search by Image functionality?

I already tried that. As far as I can tell it’s impossible to restore.

just to be clear, the search by image function still works… one just can’t do it with a right click anymore. Or at least some of us can’t. It seems Lens hasn’t been rolled out everywhere yet.

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I use Tineye extension on Chrome. It’s pretty good for finding exact duplicates, not so great if the images have been cropped or flipped though.

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I added the RevEye extension on Chrome since the last update- it gives access to TinEye and reverse google image search. It also gives you Bing and Yandex, but those just give similar images and are therefore useless.

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I actually did delete Google Lens, but it didn’t bring back my image search.

yes… but you can still do a Google Image search two other ways.

These other methods require more clicks/work, for sure. But not (for me, anyhow) substantially more. My original post has more info. I’ve been going to Google Image search but now that I know I can find a link it at the bottom of a Google Lens search, I’ll likely be using that.

The third method I spoke about from the link I provided has just recently been deactivated. I was finding posts from late Dec 2021 that indicated it worked but March 2022 posts report it no longer works. I believe this is the method @dianastuder referred to.

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I use tineye as a site, not an extension. I don’t know if it works better that way.

I once found an observation image in a stock photo & flagged it.
It came out that the observer actually WAS the person who took the original stock photo and sold/licensed it to the stock photo site.

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Those are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Oh, of course!
And in those cases, the mistaken flag can be resolved.

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One that usually prompts me to double check is a vast range in the quality of photos in their observations. i.e, it’s not that all their photos are “too good”, it’s that their photos are all over the place between amateur & professional - not just equipment issues like image clarity, but in how they compose the shot, center it, etc.

If some are blurry and/or taken with a cell phone, but others are magazine quality, that’ll usually prompt me to start reverse image searching - or at least to dig more: check the info “i” on the photos to see if any EXIF data is included, if all their nice shots are made from the same camera model, etc. This is especially true if the quality differences are not in some sort of order; when both pro & amateur images are uploaded or observed at the same time.

Of course, there can be valid reasons for this too: their skills improved, they got new equipment, the quality goes from pro back to amateur because they are found & uploaded images from years ago, due to battery life or other issues they had to switch between camera & camera phone in the same day, some subjects cooperate & allow you to take your time getting a shot, while others don’t, etc.

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Had a blindingly obvious silly one yesterday. Scraped from an artist’s photomontage of a ‘hybrid’ animal. How gullible do they think we are? Ooh never seen one of those before!

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“* very high quality photos submitted by users with low observation counts. Please note there are some extremely talented photographers among iNaturalist users, and of course they all start with a low number of records. Unfortunately too often these very high quality photos are simply taken from the web, but they should be checked carefully.”

So there’s a user with about 8 pretty spectacular butterfies which someone alerted me to the fact that they are photos of a page. I keep hovering my button over the “flag” icon, but I also ask myself “What if? What if this user just happened to be taking pictures of pictures they owned and it isn’t a book after all?” or some other very improbable scenario. But do you think I’m good to flag even if I can’t prove which book they are from?
The other user marked them casual, which I think is good since they all had the same recent date anyways - clearly not correct. The observer doesn’t seem to be commenting.

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