TinEye Releases API to Leverage Image Recognition Technology for Businesses

TinEye has released a cloud-based colour search API. The first of several to be released, this MulticolorEngine API is designed to help individuals and companies search their image collections or product portfolios by colour.

TinEye, a product of Idée Inc, is a reverse image recognition platform that helps users see where specific images have appeared online. TinEye has been around since 2008 but TineEye Services is a relatively new project. It targets enterprises who want to use the technology for commercial purposes.

“Using the API, you can integrate the TinEye search engine with your own website or backend to perform searches and retrieve results from TinEye’s growing index of web images,” the company explains. “Search for incoming images on the fly, or queue up a bulk set of searches. Your API search results contain the same type of information provided by Tineye.com.”

Fans of Tineye are evidently estatic about the new MulticolorEngine. We caught this tweet from Sean Plott, who describes the new offering as the “most amazing thing I’ve seen on the internet for a long time.”

Any company with colour in their products or in images on their website—AKA everyone—can utilize the API. For example, an online retailer could let users shop products by colour. That’s always handy, especially for things like apparel and linens. Publications could also make their digital archives searchable by colour (and if you’ve ever tried to dig through a newspaper or magazine’s archived issues, you know this would be a miracle).

But the API doesn’t always have to be so obvious. The technology can also function transparently, improving a service without the user having an idea. For example, TinEye’s MobileEngine API powers Snooth’s mobile wine recognition engine. When customers snap a photo of a wine label to learn more, TinEye’s technology works invisibly in the background to deliver superior results.

Learn more about the API here.