What it’s For

The website describes itself as follows:

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.

That sums it up pretty well, but there are a few side effects of this process. For instance, if you like pictures of a certain type of flower, or variations on a particular internet meme, TinEye’s ability to match similarities can bring you results that would otherwise be difficult to match by filename or keyword. If you’re a digital artist or photographer, it also has the potential to let you see where your work has gone and what changes have been made to it.

The Basics

TinEye can find not just your image, but derivatives that all share the same basic image. This can help you find the same pic even if it’s been cropped, rescaled, or sometimes even pretty heavily ‘shopped’. Chances are, the first thing you’ll want to do is try posting an image to see what comes up. For testing, I’d recommend something that’s popular and likely to have been modified several times, like the Mona Lisa or a well known meme.

If you click Choose File, you’ll be able to upload an image file for TinEye to scan.

Once the search is complete, you’ll get the results ranked in terms of closeness of the match, according to TinEye’s criteria. Further down the list, or in the following pages, you’ll find the results that are more likely to be modifications of that work instead of a close match.

It’s able to recognize Bubble Girl even though her background has completely changed with each image. I could make my own variation on the theme, post it on this page, and once TinEye gets around to crawling MTE, you’d be able to match my image to the original.

Browser Plugins

If you end up using this service a lot, the web front end might not be the most convenient way to go. To streamline the process a bit, you could install the TinEye plugin for your browser (Safari, IE, Firefox, and Chrome).

This will bring up the results just like a web search. You’ll notice in this example that TinEye found one other screenshot of the same application, and then returned images with a similar dotted pattern but no longer the same application.

Conclusion

The more I use TinEye, the more usefulness I see in it. The total database is still somewhat small by current web standards, but all signs indicate that it will only grow as the service matures. While image matching is not something I’m likely to need every day, there are certainly times where keyword searches aren’t enough. When that happens I’ll be glad to have TinEye.

TinEye

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Installation

As mentioned above, Phatch is available on all major platforms. Windows and Mac users may need to first install Python and any other missing dependencies shown on the download page, while many Linux users can find Phatch already available in their standard repositories. Ubuntu users, for example, can install with the Ubuntu Software Center or from the command line with

sudo apt-get install phatch

The GUI

The standard method of working with the Phatch GUI is to start by defining all your actions. Each action (recolor, resize, watermark, etc) happens in the sequence shown in the GUI.

If, say, Blur is set above Resize, the blur effect will happen before the resize. This can be important when working with complicated sequences of actions.

Basic Conversion

The one action that cannot be skipped is the Save action. If you forget to add it to your action list, Phatch will insist upon adding it for you. This is actually a very versatile and useful action on its own, as it allows you to convert the images to various types and/or rename in one step, such as in the following example:

In that example, all the photos will be converted to optimized PNG format, moved into the ~/Desktop/phatch folder, and renamed to include the original filename plus “_phatch” to signify that they’ve been processed.

Chaining Actions

Phatch wouldn’t be that useful if you could only apply one filter at a time. Using the + button at the top of the window, add any actions you want to apply to your images, and make sure each is set the way you want. The arrow icons at the top of the screen can be used to reorder your actions, so remember to place Save at the bottom.

Running Your Batch

If you’re anything like me, you may be thinking “Ok this all makes sense… but when do I add the files to be processed?” Instead of queuing up the files then running the actions, Phatch queues up the actions and then chooses the files. Once your actions are ready, click the gear icon at the top to begin processing.

Here is where you can choose the files to include in your batch. As you can see, you’ve got options for different file types as well as whether or not to include subfolders. When ready, click Batch to begin a test search. You’ll be shown a screen where you can verify that Phatch found all the files you wanted.

Presuming everything looks correct, hit Continue to apply all your actions.

Phatch will notify you when the work is complete, and your processed images will be found in the location specified in your Save action.

Conclusion

If you’ve got a lot of images that need a lot of work, it’s hard to beat Phatch. It’s functional, well-designed, multiplatform, and free. Even for those of us who know and love Gimp, Phatch has some compelling features. It may be a one-trick pony, but it’s very good at that trick. Happy processing!

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What if you can compress the images by up to 90% and retain the quality at the same time? This is where Caesium comes in.

Caesium is an image processing software that is able to reduce the size of your picture up to 90%, and preserve the original quality.

Why use Caesium?

The main use is to compress photos while retaining the quality. This feature by itself isn’t what makes Caesium so useful. It is the batch processing and previewing the pictures that make the whole process an enjoying experience. If you ever have the needs to upload more than a couple pictures to the web and needed to change the format and compress them, you know how awesome this application would have been.

Things Caesium can do for you

Here is a breakdown of Caesium’s features:

Compress photos

Depending on the starting file format, you can really shrink the size of the image. If you are starting with a BMP or PNG and converting to a JPEG, you will get the best compression. If you are going from JPEG to JPEG, you will not be able to compress it as much without altering the quality.

Previewing images

Previewing the images before you compress and upload them is a huge time saver. In Caesium’s main window, you can select the image on the left and click preview. If you need the image to be smaller, you can play with the settings a little. If you adjust the quality too low, the picture will be too grainy. If the quality is set to high, the picture will be larger.

Batch processing

If you are changing several images, this is a must have feature. You are able to select all of the images in a folder. If you prefer, you can drag and drop images into Caesium. When you are altering several images, you will be able to select the quality of each image separately. Doing this will give you the best size to quality ratio.

You can also add a suffix to the name of the file during the process for easy searching or filing later.

Portable

If you use a portable applications on your USB drive, here is a great addition to your arsenal. On Caesium’s download page, you will be able to download the .exe or portable version.

Why you would use Caesium

I can see many of you out there wondering where you may need this kind of application. Here are a couple examples of how you could use Caesium:

• Compressing pictures to meet the maximum size requirements for social sites like Facebook
• Sending multiple pictures via email.
• Saving space on your hard drive or USB thumb drive.
• Put a portable version on your USB drive so you can re-size and upload pictures while on the road.
• Keeping the total file size smaller when adding pictures to a document or presentation.

There are plenty of ways you can make use of Caesium and we have only listed a few. What’s yours?

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So we need pictures. Where can we get them? We can:

- go around the neighborhood with our digital camera.

- snatch a picture or two from image sharing community sites like Flickr or Picasa Web Album.
- capture the picture from our computer screen.

Geeky bloggers like me prefer the last. The method fits my blog theme and I don’t have to stand too long under the sun nor face legal threats for ‘stealing’ copyrighted images.

Shoot the screen

Almost everybody I know agrees and recommends Gadwin Print Screen as one of the best tools out there, and I am sure that this simple tool will be very useful you.

It is a small application that resides on the taskbar after it is installed in your Windows.

The first thing you would want to do is adjust the settings. Right click on the icon and choose “Properties”.

Here users can choose:

• the hot key to use – default is “Print Screen” key.
• what area to be captured – current window, client window, full screen, or rectangular area
• where to save the image file
• what application to open the file
• what is the default image file type and – if wanted – the default size
• and so many other options

Manage the Image

If you choose an application to open the captured screen image, you can do further editing to the file. A free alternative application you can use for this purpose is Fast Stone Image Viewer.

This one is a very reliable image editing application for daily use – rotate, resize, crop, adjust color, and such (but please do not compare it to Photoshop); more than enough for common blogging activity. All the images in a folder will be shown in one pane, ready to be manipulated. Use the Edit menu to access many of the commands.

It also has screen capturing feature, but less comfortable compare to Gadwin. Fast Stone doesn’t reside in the taskbar – so you’ll need to open the main window first, and there’s no shortcut key to do the capturing.

One little neat trick

Here’s something that anybody could try to make their screenshot unordinary and catchy.

• After taking the screenshot, open the image with Fast Stone
• Go to “Edit –> Rotate –> Rotate by any degree” menu
• Move the rotation slider slightly to the left to rotate the image counter clockwise (or the opposite to rotate it clockwise). I think about 15 degrees is enough. Click OK afterwards.
• Go to “Edit -> Cropboard” menu and crop the image to your preference. But I’d suggest somewhere in the middle.
• Click “Crop To File” and “Save” then “Close”.

And you’ll have something like this:

Not very professional, but… neat, huh?

If you have other favorite screen capturing application, share in the comment below.

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