Image Search

Why

Finding where an image came from, or a larger copy of it, meant saving it, opening a search engine and uploading it again. Each engine finds different things, so a thorough search meant doing that several times. I wrote Image Search in 2015 to make it one right-click.

How it works

Right-click any image and open Search image with…. Pick one provider, or All enabled providers to open each in its own tab, in the background or focused. Each provider is good at something different: Google Lens at objects, products, landmarks and text; TinEye at exact or edited copies and where they appeared first; Bing Visual Search at similar images and products; Yandex at matches from a different index; SauceNAO at the original source of illustrations, anime and manga; and trace.moe, off by default, at naming the anime, episode and exact scene behind a screenshot.

Instagram lays invisible elements over its photos, so the browser often does not know you right-clicked an image. A small script that runs only on instagram.com finds the photo under the click and keeps its address in memory for up to two minutes, so the menu works there too.

Version 2

The original was built on Firefox's Add-on SDK, which Firefox has long since dropped, and its engine list had aged. Version 2 is a complete rewrite as a modern Manifest V3 WebExtension. One codebase builds for Firefox and for Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi and other Chromium browsers. It has no dependencies, tests for every provider and setting, and a weekly check that reports when a provider starts timing out or failing.

Privacy

There is no server, no analytics and no ads, and the add-on does not ask for access to every website or to your history: it needs only the right-click menu and synced settings. An image's address goes to a provider only when you choose that provider. Images that cannot be shared by address, such as local files, and addresses on private networks are never sent; the add-on explains why instead of opening broken tabs.