Using Google Reverse Image Search – Is it a copyrighted image?

March 20, 2024 / in How To, Information Technology / by Jason Terry

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Hello friends! This week, I wanted to share a really cool Tech Tip that my good friend and client, Christy Rogers with Training Umbrella, share with me recently. (Of course it makes sense that Christy would be teaching me something since that is one of the things she does for a living!) For those of you that don’t know about Training Umbrella, they provide on site and virtual training classes for you and your employees covering Microsoft and Google products and pretty much anything else.

Let me lay the foundation for you…

We were working on one of the Training Umbrella (TU) blog posts together recently and one of the images provided look like it might be stock photography. I mentioned this potential copyright risk and suggested that we make sure we had the rights to use this picture commercially in a blog post on the TU website. Christy said, why don’t we do a reverse image search to figure out where this came from? My answer… WHAT?!?!?! I had no idea you could do that. :)

We determined that the photo was a copyrighted image from Shutterstock and that a license was required to use it commercially. Instead, we found a similar, royalty free image on Pixabay.com to use instead.

Watch and Learn!

I hope you will watch the video to learn how you can upload any image to Google Search and determine what other websites that image is being used on as well as dig into where the image actually came from. It’s pretty cool how that works. And thank you for taking the time to read and watch… I’m always trying to teach you something, make you laugh or make you think. Let me know in the comments if I succeeded!