TinEye for the next guy

I received a request a couple of weeks back from a Russian railway magazine for a photograph of robotic lobsters I took in 2005 during my first year working for the Office of Naval Research. I posted an update to this blog about the original shoot in December of that year.

I didn't realize it at the time, but that one day shoot north of Boston would produce probably the most requested photograph I've made here in seven years. Everyone from the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt museum to trade journals, websites and even apparently railway magazines in Russia have requested this image.

I bring this all up because I was demonstrating the TinEye reverse image search site to a coworker and happened to have the RoboLobster photo on my desktop (Russian railway magazine). I uploaded the image and one of the results was National Geographic - the Japanese edition mind you - but still I thought it was pretty funny.

Try out the service yourself, you never know? And if your images are not in the public domain like mine, and you've copyrighted them, it could mean a very nice payday as well.