Image is one of the most common content types found on the internet. Regarding image, you can get one on premium stock photo agencies like Shutterstock or Depositphotos to free image providers like Unsplash and Pixabay.

There are a bunch of resources to get images for your projects. The biggest challenge is finding a unique image that has not been used by anyone before. How to figure out if an image has not been used before?

The easiest way to figure out if an image has not been used on the internet is by using Google Images. Google Images is a part of Google Search. The different is, Google Image searches web pages based on image instead of text. Google Images will use the uploaded image as the search query. It then will display all of the similar images on the page results, will may also include web results, pages with the image, and different resolutions of the image.

Using Google Images to figure if an image has been used before

You can make of Google Images to figure out if an image has been used on the internet before. You can do this by identifying the page results. Take a look at the example below.

We will use the following image as the example.

Visit the website of Google Images and upload the image you want to identify by dragging it to the search column.

Now, notice the page results to see if the image you uploaded has been used before. On this example, the image we uploaded has been used as a featured image on several blog posts.

Google Images can recognize images in both PNG and JPG format, even if the images contain watermark. You can also use the method above in case you are a contributor of stock photo agency and curious about how your photos are used.

In addition to Google Images, you can also use online image finder tools like Reverse Image Search to find out how your images appear online or to find the similar images with your images.