Topic: Tips on how to confuse TinEye.

[smokester]

Although these games are just a bit of fun, some of them do require some effort to solve.  There are much easier ways of solving them but the means are not always honest, so here are some tips if you want to ensure they are played fairly.

TinEye.

TinEye is a site that can source images and therefore discover who they are of.

How does TinEye work?

When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or 'fingerprint' for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in our index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match.

TinEye does not typically find similar images (i.e. a different image with the same subject matter); it finds exact matches including those that have been cropped, edited or resized.

There are a few ways to confound TinEye that vary in strength, and here are 3 that have been worked out.

1. One quite quick way to do it that doesn't take too much effort is to simply flip the image horizontally.  If you have a photobucket account you can do it directly from the editing tools there.  The result is this:

  > 

Although this will work 99% of the time the obvious drawback is that it is not a hard process to undo.  That said, we are an honest bunch and this process is enough to remove temptation IMO.

2. The second method is far more aggressive but in turn is far more secure.  It requires editing the image in such a way that it doesn't leave TinEye enough to sample.  Here is an example and you can see that the only part of the image that is original is the all important "face", this method also leaves the background visible which may be an intentional clue in the game.  This method only works about 75% of the time though, as usually it will be the face of a person that has been cropped out and used many times over the net.



3. By far easiest and most secure way of doing it is to get yourself a TinEye account to test with, use Google images to search for photos of the person you want to submit, and find one that TinEye hasn't indexed yet.  This method works 99.9% of the time although TinEye does index many images each day.

Any other ways that you know to confuzzle TinEye, then post them here please.

[CMF]

Man, the second method is often hard to realize. 

[JackFrost]

Well, as some of you might have noticed, I make cut-out .gif images of some of my stumpers.

Generally I choose a pic with a bland, flat-color background (like the one in smokes' first example) and cut the person out of it.

TinEye has no idea what to do with the image... 

[Beatrix]

I like tin eye, but I don't use it, I always thought it was cheating! haha.  But really, i did use it when i first started using a fora.  I just googled " reverse image search "

[smokester]

There are basically 2 schools of thought: One is that you post whatever pictures you like and trust the players to work things out on their own and don't do a reverse image search, and the other is that you protect the image from reverse searching to remove that possibility altogether.

I do both depending on how much time I have available.  As a matter of fact, I like foiling the image search engines for no other reason than to beat them.

There are no prizes available anyhow, so none of it really matters.

[6pairsofshoes]

The first image is a portrait of Philip Cortelyou Johnson, a great American architect.  His adoption of spectacle frames identical to those worn by Le Corbusier, the French modernist also muddy the waters of easy recognition.