OSINT at Home #20: Four Best Image Reverse Search Tools

[Music] hi everyone and welcome back to this series on how to do open-source investigations from home I'm Ben and this is part 20 so let's get [Music] [Music] started in this tutorial we're going to focus on exploring the B wide world of image reverse search tools and we're going to go through the practicalities and capabilities of various tools that have been designed to help us dive deeper into the origins and occurrences and context around images so whether you're an investigative journalist a researcher an open-source intelligence Specialist or simply an Enthusiast just keen on unraveling the details behind an image this tutorial aims to provide that comprehensive understanding of how to use these tools for investigations and research purposes in this tutorial I'm going to use two examples one is a satellite image from the Daily Mail so sources like this often have to be fact checked or or research to get a little more context as to what's behind them but also an image from my Twitter account which is a face and this face is actually artificially generated and was used as part of a disinformation campaign or an influence operation in 2020 that I researched so let's start with the first one which is Google image reverse search many of you who have been watching my channel probably know about this tool already you might have seen it pop up in one or two of my videos in order to use Google Google image reverse search it's super simple I've taken a screenshot of that satellite image that I'm using as my first example and I'm simply going to click the button on the far right here of the Google search box called search by image which allows me to upload a file I've uploaded my screenshot of the satellite image and you can see it appear there on the left and you can see some of those images on the right there that look pretty pretty close to what I'm after the first one is the link back to the Daily Mail which is where I took this image from but we also have some other images even from different angles we have this second result which looks to be extremely similar but we even have this one that appears to be from NASA so I'll click on this link because it's a bit more of a trustworthy link and we can see that that has has actually come up with the exact same result that we're originally looking at this water or body of water that actually looks kind of like a bit of a head with a high set of hair at the front perhaps and we can see that same image here which appears to be Lake NEOS in Cameroon and this is super interesting because we can actually see different types of the image here and we can also pull a Geo if which is the satellite imagery in its raw version so that was very easy doing that one but what if we wanted to search for the exact image itself so Google image reverse search or Google Lens actually has this function built into it which is find image source and if we click on this one we can see multiple copies of the image and where else it's popped up so say for example while the Daily Mail posted it on one Monday we also have New York breaking we have what appears to be perhaps the same article with the same images same as on the 29th of May what's new today also has the the same one as well so quite interesting to see that and that really helps us search for the source of an exact image not just images like it if we try the same thing on Yandex that's super easy just like Google image of our search we have a little icon with the camera we simply click on that we can select the file and upload that screenshot that we have and again we have a number of other examples because Yandex is actually a Russian search engine we'll get a lot of results in Russian but also uh references to potential Russian websites or Russian language Services of different sites so we can see some of these listed there under Yandex if we click similar images we can go through those and see that and it's quite interesting because the similar images bring up many other bodies of water that look to be extremely similar or similarly shaped to the one that we're originally after another one that we can use is called teni and this is quite a popular image reverse search platform and again super easy to use all we do is is upload the image to this one it does a search and we have a couple of results that have popped up on Tini as well but you can see that the results that have popped up on both Google and Yandex are far more in both diversity of similarity of images but also more of the exact same images uh than what popped up on Tini of course Bing so Microsoft Bing also competes in this realm and has a image reverse search function as well so it has a very similar aspect to how Google and Yandex works by search using an image that little button there and again we can upload an image into that search box and have a look for related content this seems to bring up similar results in comparison to Yandex and Google it also breaks down a couple of little tabs so for example we have pages with this image and then we can also see related content Bing is also quite interesting because we have the function to do uh a crop image Yandex also has this as well and it allows us to ship that image or search for things within that image the next one we're going to look at is BYU which is a Chinese search engine and also delivers a varying degree of results as well similarly to Yandex this is language based and also country specific primarily providing Chinese results it works in the same way that it has the little camera icon and you can upload a image there as well as you can see with BYU it's actually given us some different results to what we had on Yandex and also what we had from Google image reverse search and some of these results are interesting they bring up videos and bits of content that wasn't necessarily popping up in Yandex or Google as well so really helpful if you're trying to look for different aspects that might be coming from China or in languages that are not necessarily searched within the image reverse search engines of Google or Yandex or Bing some more smaller and less used tools are stock image platforms so say for example gy images uh actually has a function and the gety image reverse search also allows you to search for that content obviously the Google Earth image is not going to pop up but it does bring up a number of satellite images as well as aerial images and that's interesting given the kind of wider availability of aerial photography and satellite imagery the same applies to shutter stock as well which is another provider of stock imagery you can also use this to search for images and you you notice the similarity between the results you would get on gy and the results you would get on shutter stock we also have Alami which works in the same way as Google and Yandex and is also a stock photo uh provider as well as aerial photography and satellite imagery and we can see some different images even of this one so it goes to show that I've kind of ranked these in order of usefulness my first go-to option is always Google Google lens and find image source and then Yandex as well to get the most results depending on my research subject so if I was looking at say uh China specifically or China related issues I would use BYO for that aspect because you can see that we have stock image providers specifically gy which is why used by news outlets if you have footage of a protest or specific events within the news it's very useful to upload that image into here and to reverse search that to get more context such as location capture time and things like that if you wanted to cross reference that for details so now we'll go back to the second example which is our friendly face over here our friendly artificially generated face this was actually from a platform called this person does not exist and is the reason why chose to use this face rather than going through all of the platforms I'm going to stick with the main three that I just went through Google Yandex and BYU and I'm going to do that by right clicking and using some of the tools I have embedded so the first one is search image with Google and you can see that that image there's a lot of similar images however that one image pops up here as the Belling cut article that I wrote in 2020 that research piece there that image didn't really give us too much and just basically took us to the source where the link is used which is quite interesting because it doesn't link the Twitter source as well I've done the same image reverse search on Yandex as well and I think this is where it gets to be a little bit more more interesting so first of all instead of Google which only showed one link we have a few different links so we have one to Twitter one to threader app uh and one to another website that use the image but what's interesting about this one is that many of the similar images appear to be much more different to what you would get on Google and that's because Yandex has a better facial recognition system but also a better system at bringing up similar faces or similar images you'll notice that Google many of the images here focus on sports hats or what it believes to have been a sports hat in the original image it shows different faces in different pointing in different directions whereas the one on Yandex is quite interesting because it shows other faces facing forward now don't forget this is an artificially generated face so I thought it might be interesting to look at some of these images on yendex here for example we have a face here with what appears to be a very odd bit of text up on here but also appears to have long hairs coming out of here and some warping happening over here and oddly shaped here ear and oddly shaped ear and even has a yellow piece of fabric or clothing over here but then a different color over here personally I think this is a artificially generated image it happens it claims to be a 40-year-old person from Kazakhstan on a dating website it looks like we might have a couple of these images floating around that might be also artificially generated which is a very interesting aspect of Yandex is that some of these images have actually during the image reverse search have caught perhaps more artificially generated images as a result of reverse searching an artificially generated face I've also done an image reverse search on BYO which gives completely different examples as you can see this one focuses on the blue hat and faces working or pointing towards the same direction so very different from Yandex in the kind of delivery but you can see the difference between the recommended images of Google the recommended images of Yandex which even brought up some of the fake faces that failed to blur properly and don't have the writing on the hats and then BYO which brings up very different faces as well in wrapping up this tutorial we've gone through a number of the prominent image reverse search tools and having a look at each of the distinct features and specializations and specifically the the differing results that each of them come up with the tools that we've looked at are indispensable assets for researchers across various fields and and really help you to uncover intricate details but also verify the authenticity of an image or extract more information about an image and what's actually happening in that event I hope that this tutorial helps and is a valuable resource for you and if you found it helpful please consider leaving a comment for your favorite tool or leaving a comment with an investigation or research piece you may have used it in or even simply sharing it with a colleague that might find it useful thank you so much for joining this session and I'll see you in the next [Music] one [Music]

Channel: Bendobrown

Views: 22,848

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Id: 0pRcutNq7U4

Length: 15min 4sec (904 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 23 2023