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Dropped $60 on a 'certified' reverse image search tool for one story, and it missed the original photo in 30 seconds
I write for a small site and we picked up a photo going around about a protest in Phoenix from 2019. I paid $60 for one month of a paid image lookup tool because free ones kept choking on cropped pics, and it swore the pic was new that week. A reader DM'd me the same shot from an AP article dated March 2019 in two minutes using plain Google Lens. Now I'm out $60 and a correction, so what free tools do you all actually trust for checking photo dates?
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felixlane6d ago
TinEye has been my go to for years and it still catches stuff Google misses sometimes. The trick with any of them is cropping the photo down to the main subject before you search, because the full frame with a weird crop or text overlay will fool the matching. I also search the oldest date filter on Google Images after I find a match, since the tool result often shows a later repost, not the source. For dating, I pull the image into Yandex too, it indexes a lot of foreign news sites the others skip. Between TinEye, Google Lens, and Yandex you cover most of it for free. The paid tools mostly just wrap the same engines and charge you for a nicer box around the results.
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