I came across a thread on Wickedfire recently where someone was asking about how to go about getting lots of images for a site without much of a budget. Of course you could just steal them, but then you risk the content owner finding out about it and hassling you. Another problem is that Google will see them as duplicate image content and won’t rank your images in their image search. Here is a simple workaround I’ve used plenty of times in the past.

TinEye – Reverse Image Search is a site you may be familiar with. It’s basically a site with a huge index of images that you can use to cross reference any particular image and find out if it exists anywhere else on the internet. Many stock photo owners and webmasters use it to see if and where their images are being used. However, most of us just use it to find additional pictures of those special hot chicks that captivate us on forums, 4chan, etc. Of course, it hasn’t come close to indexing the whole web, but as far as I know it has the largest index of image-searchable images around and it’s super easy to use. I don’t know how exactly their image detection algorithm works, but I know how it doesn’t work, and I’m pretty confident that Google uses something similar to identify duplicate images.

Let’s use this silly cat picture as an example:

If you look this image up on TinEye (url: http://offwhitehat.com/images/catteeth-original.jpg), there are a whole bunch of results, as it has been published all over the internet. In my initial testing, I tried converting images to black & white to see if that would make them appear unique, but as you can tell by running a search on this image: http://offwhitehat.com/images/catteeth_bw.jpg, it is too smart for that.

My next experiment was mirroring the image, and voila, it works. Check out this horizontally flipped version of the image: http://offwhitehat.com/images/catteeth-reverse.jpg. Do a search and this here website should be the only one in the index for that particular image. All I did was flip it in Photoshop. If you are a Photoshop noob, you just go to Image > Image Rotation > Flip Canvas Horizontally. I’m sure most photo programs have the same capability. Some are probably even easier than others. However, Photoshop has a sweet batch function that you can use to automate the flipping of your images.

Of course, for images with text and special circumstances like that, this technique may not be the greatest. But yawning cat pictures? The best!

Anyway, now you have a way to steal lots of images, make them look like unique image content, and make it super hard for the people you are robbing to find out. Neat!

PS This is probably illegal and I totally don’t think you should do it. This is all hypothetical.

Edit: I forgot to add that this method won’t work on images that are nearly symmetrical. There needs to be a significant degree of variation to the flipped version, like with the cat example above.