You should check the copyright of images on the Web before you add them to your blog or website. To check the copyright you’ll need to find matching images, which you can do with the TinEye image search engine. It’s one of the few reverse image search engines that will find matching pictures.

First, open the TinEye page in the shot below. There you can select an image to search for by pressing the Browse button. Alternatively, enter an image URL (Universal Resource Locator) in the search box. To obtain the image URL, right-click the picture and select Copy Image Location from the Firefox or Google Chrome context menus. Paste the URL in the TinEye search box with the Ctrl + V hotkey.

Then press the Search button on the TinEye page. The page will display a list of matching images as in the shot below. Beside each matching image there is a source URL you can click to open the page it’s on, and check for details that might provide some copyright details for the picture. The page also shows you extra details for the image size, format and resolution.

With this search tool you can now find which other websites include matching images. That will probably make it clearer as to whether the image is public domain or not, and you can also find better resolutions and modified versions of the picture with TinEye. In addition, TinEye has an extension that you can add to Firefox to search for matching images directly from the browser’s context menu.