reverse-image
TinEye
The oldest dedicated reverse-image engine, indexing more than 70 billion images and specializing in exact and edited copies, including the earliest indexed appearance of an image. The web search is free to use manually; the API is paid, so there is no automated route here. Especially valuable when you need to date an image or establish where it first surfaced.
No programmatic check, opens the archive’s own search.
Why it’s useful & how it works
TinEye is the original dedicated reverse-image engine and remains the best tool for establishing an image's history: it records the earliest date it found each image, making it invaluable for verifying whether a photograph is being used out of context or was originally published long before the event it claims to show. It specializes in exact and near-exact copies, catching cropped, colour-adjusted, and recompressed versions. Because the API requires a paid commercial bundle, Echo hands you a direct link to TinEye's free web search, where you can upload or paste a URL yourself.
What’s inside
Approximately 79 billion images indexed from across the web as of 2026, growing by millions of new images each day through continuous crawling.
API access
https://api.tineye.com/rest/search/ (HMAC-signed, PAID bundles)
An API key is required (usually free); see the endpoints above for where to get one.
What we measured
Our own probes, not the archive’s own claims. Re-run periodically; every reading below is dated.
Reachability
- Direct request
- Cloudflare challenge HTTP 200 337 ms (challenge-platform)
- Through a datacenter proxy
- Cloudflare challenge HTTP 200 888 ms (challenge-platform)
- API, direct
- Blocked HTTP 401 621 ms
- API, through a proxy
- Blocked HTTP 401 605 ms
Reachability measured 2026-08-22.
Access
Programmatic API access (a key may be required, see the API tag).