Reverse Google Image Search to Collect Evidence

Most people are probably already familiar with Google Image Search. If you need a picture of something for a PowerPoint presentation, you just enter a word or description at images.google.com and you can easily get hundreds of different images of what you're looking for. Less well known is the ability of this search engine to perform reverse image searches. As shown in Fig. 1 below, you can upload an image on this site and find other images online that match up with it. (Put you cursor in the search box, click on the camera icon and then choose upload an image.) This will then allow you to pinpoint what an unknown object you have a photo of, actually is. Say for example we have the photo show in Fig. 2 below of a woman firing a gun. We want to know the type of gun she's firing, but it's not possible to make out any words or trademarks engraved on the weapon. We can crop the picture down to just the area around the firearm (Fig. 3) and then upload it to the Google site. The search will pull up several images of similar guns. See Fig. 4. We can click on the most similar images to go to web pages which give further information on them.