Update: An easier way to perform reverse image search on Google Images without using any app has been published here.
One thing missing in Google image search on mobile is reverse image search. In case you don’t know what this means, it means uploading an image to Google and searching for the image online with results showing similar images and pages where that particular image appear online.
I sometimes use this to get more information about a particular image or look for a larger size of the image. This reverse image search can even be used to get real stories about images with fake captions on social media.
On the web, you can simply visit images.google.com and then drag and drop an image on the search bar:
You can’t do this on mobile; Google doesn’t allow it and there’s no way to upload the image for the reverse image search.
However, there are two ways to get this done:
- Using an Android app
- Using a web app
Either of these methods work fine and produce the same result. Whichever you choose is a matter of choice.
1. Using an Android app
There’s are loads of app at the Play Store that can get this done but the problem is that most of them have bad ratings. There’s one I found that works just fine. Image Search for Google lets you do what you can’t do on mobile Google Image Search.
In addition, it lets you capture images with your primary camera and upload to Google search.
2. Using a web app
Amit Agrawal of Labnol.org wrote a beautiful web app that gets this done easily and you can find it here.
To make it easier, you can simply bookmark the page and access it whenever you need to do a reverse image search. I think it’s the better alternative and it’s what I’ve been using since I found out about it. By the way, I had issues using it on Firefiox, I had to go through Google Chrome to use it.
