If you sell your image via Stock Agencies, there is no doubt that you always ask yourself, “I wonder where they will use my image?”, every time you make a sale. Because Stock Agencies do not tell you, the contributor, who it was sold to, where it will be used.
Let me introduce myself. My name is Yanick and I am a longtime stock photographer and the founder of picMatch (www.picmatch.ca). My images are sold on Adobe Stock, Getty Images, Alamy and Dreamstime. I have sold my images thousands of times, but at some point, I wanted to know where they were published. As Reverse Image Search engines started becoming real, I started searching for my pictures, to find out where they were used online. I have made great discoveries, like finding out that one of my pictures is used on cheques. I found one of my images from Australia used in a news article for The Telegraph, another one used in a yearly report from the Humane Society, and another one used on a product's packaging. And so on, and so on…
I found it tedious to do the search manually and to peruse through the results, where were most of the time, already seen from a previous search. It takes too much time, and sometimes, there are false positives, which just wasted my time.
At some point, I started looking for tools that would automate this process. There were a handful, the best one being only available to agencies, not photographers, and the other ones were not cutting it for me in terms of quality and reliability: they looked amateurish, and they were. They are not even online anymore, so it left less competition for me to build my own.
More about me: My main career, aside from photography, is in technology. I am a software engineer who has had a great experience working with important clients, developing scalable, reliable and usable software systems. I then decide that it would be great to develop my own system, to automate Google Reverse Image search.
So, I did, and I am happy to present to you my baby, picMatch.ca! I use it all the time and it finds matches of my pictures on a regular basis. More and More photographers use it too and they are happy with their findings.
Why do you need to know where your images are used online?
Because you want to know where they are used, simply put, you are curious to know. Because it’s your work and you are happy when you see it used on a product, in the news, on a medical research document or in print. It is human nature to want to know. Let alone, that you want to make sure it’s not being used illegally somewhere and may be misrepresenting you.
Give it a try at www.picmatch.ca and we are convinced that you will like what it finds for you.
Photo by Fabio Fistarol on Unsplash