Post by Kaytina on Oct 7, 2016 22:00:57 GMT
So you found an image you want to use as an FC. The problem is you have no idea what the name of the character is or what IP it's from or even if it's from an IP or just some random artist's OC work from Pixiv. I'll tell you how you can go about finding the source! Let's find an example, first.
i.sli.mg/cgyLr8.jpg
So we got our image. Looks pretty simple. Let's go to saucenao.com. This site is a reverse image search engine. Instead of giving it text and hoping for an image, you give it an image and it tries to match the image with what it has indexed in its databate. This one is the first stop for most anime images. If you use saucenao and search the image, you get a page like this.
Click the Pixiv ID number and you get sent to a page like this as long as you have a Pixiv username and password, free by the way. But we're not done yet!
We need to figure out if this character is an original character or not. If you don't speak Japanese, there is an extra step you need to take to figure this out. Each Pixiv work has tags above the image. If you speak Japanese, you already know if this character is OC or not. But let's help the dirty gaijin who can't read moonrunes.
Highlight them, copy them, and go over to translate.google.com, paste the text in the left box, set the language to either Japanese or Detect Language, set the right box to English and boom! Original Character. Now you're done.
Now you have your artist and you know it's an OC. Make your FC!
But that was easy. Let's try a harder image.
i.sli.mg/uYGmml.png
This image has been edited to be a desktop background. You can see the character is cut off all around. But there's still enough here to make an ID. First step, saucenao.
Wait, that ain't right. All the white in the image is messing up the image search. Well, saucenao has an option to fix that. Click on your image on the left in the saucenao page. It will send you to a page where you can crop the area of the image you want to search. Good for getting rid of a lot of edits like additions put on by wallpaper makers.
Then you just click modified search down at the bottom and boom. Found. Follow the same steps above to figure out the source info.
But wait! This isn't an OC! And Google's translation tool is absolute garbage! What now?
Weeeell, now we have to tread some muddied waters. Make sure you got no one behind you that can see your screen cus you might accidentally see boobies. Under your image to the left you will notice a bunch of small icons. Click the little
. This will send your cropped image to another reverse image search tool called IQDB.org. IQDB indexes what I like to call the Boorus. They are online image galleries that host art and index them by user-defined tags. Most also contain porn, but not all of them. And you can disable the porn by making an account on their sites and turning on safe search. Anyway, IQDB gives us this result.
Just pick whichever one you want. I will pull up the Gelbooru result for this image. And boom. There to the left is all the tags in English and there's your source. You can also use this to find out if your image is an OC. And further down the page, most Boorus will list sources as well.
Boorus are also great places to find FC because you can specify what characteristics you want to look for. Just be sure to add rating:safe to your search unless you want to sift through a LOT of porn.
Now. What if we did all of the above and we still haven't found a source? Yeah, sometimes images just don't want to be found. But don't fret! Unless it was posted completely anonymously on the 4chans by an anonymous drawfag, a source can be found for just about anything. We just need to spread our search to the wider Internet. Three new reverse image search tools become useful here. images.google.com, tineye.com, and yandex.ru. Everyone should be familiar with Google. It has its own reverse image search capability. You might not be familiar with the next two. Tineye is actually one of the first reverse image search tools. It indexes a lot of forums. Yandex is basically Russia's Google. It can be useful when you run entirely out of options. It has reverse image search capability, too. Don't worry if you can't read Russian, it's very straight forward to use.
Let's use this image for the hard mode search.
i.sli.mg/63s5dc.jpg
First of all, saucenao gives us nothing and so does IQDB. Let's try tineye.
Tineye gives us one result, but the color is a little different. Keep this image for a bit. Sometimes recolors happen and your image might actually be recolored. Repeat the saucenao and IQDB searches on the new image. If you still get nothing, move on to Google.
Holy schnickies! 25 BILLION Results! Now we're getting somewhere! It even shows what character this is! But there can only be one source! All of those results are reposts of the same image. There has to be another way to narrow this down. There is.
Beside a lot of these results are dates. These are the dates that these sites report the image was uploaded to their servers. We can use Google's built-in functionality to narrow down results based on their time of posting. Stick with just putting the year in the to: category. Continue going back in time year by year until you get to a point where no results show up. At this point you will know when abouts this image first appeared on the Internet. For example, this image doesn't get any results from 2011 and futher. So the image appeared on the Internet in 2012.
By just setting the search engine to not show posts after 2012, we have narrowed this down by quite a lot. Now we can just look at the results and pick the one that was posted first. In this case, our image appeared on the Internet in February of 2012.
Now look through your final result. If it looks to be like something of an art blog, you found your source! If you are still having trouble finding the source of your image, don't give up! It might be that your image has been modified in some way, such as being cropped or flipped around. Try using yandex.ru
Click the little camera icon, upload or paste the url to your image in the box, and hit the little box to the right.
Yandex gives a much more varied result, including various image sizes, crops, et cetera. It's good for finding the original size and crop of an image that may have been edited at some point during its existence on the Internet.
That's about all you need to know to find the source of any image you come across. If you followed my tips and still haven't found your source, post it below and I'll give a look for it myself or someone else will look for it. If you have any questions or if I didn't explain something fully, just ask as well.
i.sli.mg/cgyLr8.jpg
So we got our image. Looks pretty simple. Let's go to saucenao.com. This site is a reverse image search engine. Instead of giving it text and hoping for an image, you give it an image and it tries to match the image with what it has indexed in its databate. This one is the first stop for most anime images. If you use saucenao and search the image, you get a page like this.
Click the Pixiv ID number and you get sent to a page like this as long as you have a Pixiv username and password, free by the way. But we're not done yet!
We need to figure out if this character is an original character or not. If you don't speak Japanese, there is an extra step you need to take to figure this out. Each Pixiv work has tags above the image. If you speak Japanese, you already know if this character is OC or not. But let's help the dirty gaijin who can't read moonrunes.
Highlight them, copy them, and go over to translate.google.com, paste the text in the left box, set the language to either Japanese or Detect Language, set the right box to English and boom! Original Character. Now you're done.
Now you have your artist and you know it's an OC. Make your FC!
But that was easy. Let's try a harder image.
i.sli.mg/uYGmml.png
This image has been edited to be a desktop background. You can see the character is cut off all around. But there's still enough here to make an ID. First step, saucenao.
Wait, that ain't right. All the white in the image is messing up the image search. Well, saucenao has an option to fix that. Click on your image on the left in the saucenao page. It will send you to a page where you can crop the area of the image you want to search. Good for getting rid of a lot of edits like additions put on by wallpaper makers.
Then you just click modified search down at the bottom and boom. Found. Follow the same steps above to figure out the source info.
But wait! This isn't an OC! And Google's translation tool is absolute garbage! What now?
Weeeell, now we have to tread some muddied waters. Make sure you got no one behind you that can see your screen cus you might accidentally see boobies. Under your image to the left you will notice a bunch of small icons. Click the little
. This will send your cropped image to another reverse image search tool called IQDB.org. IQDB indexes what I like to call the Boorus. They are online image galleries that host art and index them by user-defined tags. Most also contain porn, but not all of them. And you can disable the porn by making an account on their sites and turning on safe search. Anyway, IQDB gives us this result.Just pick whichever one you want. I will pull up the Gelbooru result for this image. And boom. There to the left is all the tags in English and there's your source. You can also use this to find out if your image is an OC. And further down the page, most Boorus will list sources as well.
Boorus are also great places to find FC because you can specify what characteristics you want to look for. Just be sure to add rating:safe to your search unless you want to sift through a LOT of porn.
Now. What if we did all of the above and we still haven't found a source? Yeah, sometimes images just don't want to be found. But don't fret! Unless it was posted completely anonymously on the 4chans by an anonymous drawfag, a source can be found for just about anything. We just need to spread our search to the wider Internet. Three new reverse image search tools become useful here. images.google.com, tineye.com, and yandex.ru. Everyone should be familiar with Google. It has its own reverse image search capability. You might not be familiar with the next two. Tineye is actually one of the first reverse image search tools. It indexes a lot of forums. Yandex is basically Russia's Google. It can be useful when you run entirely out of options. It has reverse image search capability, too. Don't worry if you can't read Russian, it's very straight forward to use.
Let's use this image for the hard mode search.
i.sli.mg/63s5dc.jpg
First of all, saucenao gives us nothing and so does IQDB. Let's try tineye.
Tineye gives us one result, but the color is a little different. Keep this image for a bit. Sometimes recolors happen and your image might actually be recolored. Repeat the saucenao and IQDB searches on the new image. If you still get nothing, move on to Google.
Holy schnickies! 25 BILLION Results! Now we're getting somewhere! It even shows what character this is! But there can only be one source! All of those results are reposts of the same image. There has to be another way to narrow this down. There is.
Beside a lot of these results are dates. These are the dates that these sites report the image was uploaded to their servers. We can use Google's built-in functionality to narrow down results based on their time of posting. Stick with just putting the year in the to: category. Continue going back in time year by year until you get to a point where no results show up. At this point you will know when abouts this image first appeared on the Internet. For example, this image doesn't get any results from 2011 and futher. So the image appeared on the Internet in 2012.
By just setting the search engine to not show posts after 2012, we have narrowed this down by quite a lot. Now we can just look at the results and pick the one that was posted first. In this case, our image appeared on the Internet in February of 2012.
Now look through your final result. If it looks to be like something of an art blog, you found your source! If you are still having trouble finding the source of your image, don't give up! It might be that your image has been modified in some way, such as being cropped or flipped around. Try using yandex.ru
Click the little camera icon, upload or paste the url to your image in the box, and hit the little box to the right.
Yandex gives a much more varied result, including various image sizes, crops, et cetera. It's good for finding the original size and crop of an image that may have been edited at some point during its existence on the Internet.
That's about all you need to know to find the source of any image you come across. If you followed my tips and still haven't found your source, post it below and I'll give a look for it myself or someone else will look for it. If you have any questions or if I didn't explain something fully, just ask as well.
