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12 Best Image & Visual Search Engines for Digital Marketers
Need to find an image for your next blog post, social media posts, or website design? Do you need a high-resolution image for your next marketing promotions? This article lists the best image search tools where you can find the right images for any business purpose.
These days, image search is on the horizon, and no matter the kind of image you're looking for, chances are, you'll find it in at least one of these image search engine tools that I'm about to share with you.
Also, learn how you can easily do a reverse image search to find an image source.
Reverse Image Search is a powerful technology that helps find image sources on the web. It helps you quickly discover similar images from the internet. It also allows you to upload images into the Search Engines and the engines will display similar images from around the web.
These tools give you high-res images, improving visual representation of your online materials - that you can use in your next marketing campaign, blog post or website.
Image search engines are a go-to tool for any type of image you want; you will have an all-purpose photo suitable for all types of businesses, no matter the niche. You can find beautiful photos to use as your PC wallpaper and your smartphone wallpaper as well.
Best Visual Search Engines for Marketers
1. TinEye Reverse Image Search Engine
TinEye is a reverse image search engine. It helps you source images on the internet and shows you where it is. TinEye image search engine allows you to search using URLs or upload your images.
Beside the search bar is where you can upload your image from your computer to find where the image is online.
TinEye has a Chrome extension that allows you to easily reverse image search while browsing on the internet. This Chrome extension lets you right-click on any image directly and search for it using TinEye’s technology without visiting the website.
2. Google Images
Google Images are images you can easily discover with a single click. You only need to type a keyword and hit enter. It comes with an in-depth search through the application of filters.
For example, here's what a search for the keyword "Blue Bird" shows. Now with this, I can narrow down the images to just logo, cartoons, clipart drawings, and illustrations.
At the top right of the image search results is tools, right beside settings. This tool gives you access to more, in-depth filtering: size, colour, usage rights, type of photo, and like TinEye, you can view when the images were uploaded/created.
Google image search is super-handy for finding exactly the kind of image you want, including images that are royalty-free.
Google Reverse Image Search
Want to do a reverse image search? Use Google tool. To do this, click on the camera icon in the search box.
3. Yahoo Image Search
An alternative to Google images is Yahoo images from the Yahoo Image Search.
Although both look similar, the results are slightly different from each other.
In Yahoo image search, you'll notice the filtering tools are not hidden, but easy to access.
4. Bing Image Search
A close alternative to google image search is the Bing (Microsoft) image search. Its layout and features are still pretty close to that of Google. You’ll see similar results:
One feature that makes Bing unique is the People filter. The people filter option lets you choose photos of people according to how they were photographed (just faces or head & shoulders).
5. Pinterest Visual Search Tool
Pinterest is more of an image search engine than what people take it to be - social media like Facebook and the rest. Pinterest has a collection of images on its platform. Each image is connected with the source, which means just like TinEye, you can find any image source you are looking for on the internet.
The image-based platform is easy to use; to get started, create an account (if you don't have one). Click on any pin in your home feed (or on any profile or board). And finally, click on the icon in the bottom-right corner of the pinned image.
The image search tool will return visually similar results to the image you searched.
Pinterest's visual search engine has a large database of images in its platform stored from collections of user-created pins.
6. Picsearch
Picsearch is a picture search engine with a more varied result.
Although the results it returns for your search queries are not as specific as what you’ll find in Google, Bing, or Yahoo, if you need an image search engine other than these three, Picsearch could be a good picture search engine to discover interesting photos that broadly match what you are looking for.
One interesting feature, and why some people prefer the Picsearch engine for image search is the "Advanced Search" option that lets you filter images by size, including wallpaper size.
7. Flickr
Flickr is a popular place to search for images and visuals. It's a platform where professional photographers share images of their beautiful works. Flickr is a place to find unique images (photography). If you enjoy browsing photos taken by travellers, and at events, Flickr is a search engine you would want to use.
But, If you’re looking for images to use in your marketing projects, make sure to filter your searches by the correct usage license. Most images are not royalty-free.
8. Getty Images
Looking for beautiful stock photos? Try Getty Images.
Start by searching with a keyword of the type of image you want or just search by image using the camera icon next to the search bar.
Getty images come with an inbuilt auto-suggest feature the moment you start typing which you can use to narrow down your search.
Getty Images has rich search filters that can present your search result with the exact images you’re looking for.
Note that the images on Getty Images are licensed; you can purchase on an image-by-image basis, or purchase packs of photos at a flat rate.
9. Shutterstock
Shutterstock visual search engine offers Royalty-free stock images, photos, videos, and more for your creative projects. It has a large database of images and allows users to download 10 FREE images with a risk-free trial period.
The visual search tool has two main subscription plans; a pre-paid image pack and an annual paid plan. The most popular plan includes the 350 image downloads/month which you'll get at the rate of $199.
However, if you're on a budget, a good option is the 5 royalty-free images for $49.
10. The New York Public Library Digital Collections
Are you looking for high-quality digitized items such as prints, images, high-res scans of historical books, maps, papers, sketchbooks, ledgers, photographs, and more?
The NYPL Digital Collections has a vast archive of images continuously added every day in the public domain. You can use and reuse the items in any way you like.
The moment you start exploring the visual search engine, you'll find it interesting to browse through the different digitized items.
For example, this search led me to an illustrated page from a book on New York fauna.
11. Yandex Image Search
Yandex is a Russian search engine that offers users the advantages the likes of Google, Bing offer. Yandex has its own image search engine, with which you can explore collections of images by topic or keyword.
Yandex image search also allows you to filter and sort by size, orientation, image type, file format, and many more.
The search engine has another inbuilt image aside from the regular search tool called Similar Images. It helps you to find items similar to your existing one—for example, products with similar features.
The regular Image Search is an image reverse search that needs only a fragment of an image (if you don't have the full image) to scan for it on the web.
12. Facebook Image Search
Facebook Image Search helps users to easily find Facebook users by means of Photo ID, Photo search or Advanced Facebook search. Facebook is the world's most popular social media platform. Every month more than 2 Billion people use Facebook.
Facebook Image Search Engine is different from that of Google. While Google crawls and indexes the images based on Alt text, Facebook has to look at three important factors while displaying an image for a search query.
These 3 factors are:
- It has the ability to Crawl Facebook Photos based on the Account ID
- It also has to take into account the privacy settings of the users
- Can only display public photos
Photos of users with a public setting will always appear in the results, but a privacy setting on any user’s Facebook account will be used as a determining factor and as such, photos with marks as non-public will not appear in the search.
Visual Search Engines are Gaining More Recognition
Image, photo, video search tools get lots of traffic in 2022 than they did in 2021. Pinterest, Google Images, Shutterstock, Bing and Yahoo Images are sources of traffic to many websites. If you're looking for images for your blog post, website banner, Facebook covers, ads creatives, these image search engines should be your go-to tools.
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