Lesson 128 · 2 min
Find where a photo came from
A reverse image search shows where else a picture has appeared, so you can catch old photos reused as "breaking news" and stolen profile pictures.
Many shocking images online are real photos used in the wrong place: a flood from years ago, a crowd from another country, a stranger's face on a fake profile.
Tools like Google Lens, Bing Visual Search and TinEye let you upload a picture or paste its link and see similar images across the web, often with dates.
Look for the earliest version and who posted it. If the same photo appeared long before the event it claims to show, the post is misleading.
It does not always work for brand new AI images, which may appear nowhere else. Then you fall back on asking who first posted it and whether trusted sources confirm it.
Do it now
Run your first reverse search
- 1. Save a news photo or profile picture you want to check.
- 2. Open Google Lens or TinEye and upload it.
- 3. Scroll the results for the oldest date and the original source.
Quick check
Keep going
Next →Fake citations from AIWords from this lesson
- Computer vision
- AI that makes sense of images and video, such as reading signs, spotting faces or checking products on a factory line.
- Image generation
- Creating pictures from a written description, using AI trained on very large collections of images and captions.