As the name implies, reverse video search can help you find the video source online and what other websites have that content in use.
Read the article below and you will know it is possible to use reverse video search engines to find where the video was first seen.
The detailed tutorials in this post will walk you through performing reverse video searches on Google and other online services.
You should prepare a video snapshot prior to doing the reverse video search.
To increase the chances of finding the video source, please make sure the video frame is clear and contains a particular scene.
Step 1. Open your video file in any multimedia player on your computer, while the video is playing, take a snapshot at a proper time using Windows Snipper Tool or other screenshot software like ShareX, Snagit, etc.
If you are using Mac, press Shift-Command-4, then hit the spacebar to take a snapshot of the video window.
Step 2. When it is done, save the screenshot image to your desktop in JPEG or PNG format.
1. Google Images for Reverse Video Search
Google Images offers a reverse search tool for videos and pictures. With this search engine, you are free to do searches with no restrictions on the file type or file upload size.
The strongest upside of using Google Images is that it has a vast number of images indexed. Please follow the instructions to reverse the video search.
Step 1
Go to Google Images (see picture below), click the gray camera icon and you will see a dialogue that asks you to upload images.
Step 2
In my case, I clicked “Upload an Image” and uploaded the video screenshot that is saved on the desktop.
Step 3
Google detected the source of the video very quickly.
Inside the result, you can see many similar images, some websites that have used this image, and find where the video originated.
Pro tip: After uploading the video screenshot to Google Images, you can add some keywords after the images to get an accurate result.
In my case, I know the video is from a YouTube channel, so I added the channel name, click the blue magnifying glass icon, and then I found the video in seconds.
It is not difficult to do a reverse video search using Google.
After uploading a clear screenshot from the video, and then adding a keyword in the search bar, you are able to find the exact video result online.
4 Online Tools to Help Do a Reverse Video Search
Google isn’t the only solution that aids in helping you do video reverse search.
There are many other online tools that provide reverse image search services, among which some are totally free to use and some are paid-for tools.
1. TinEye
TinEye focuses on image search and recognition. It uses image recognition technology, rather than keywords, metadata, or watermark to predict matches with your designated images.
Using this online video reverse search tool, you only need to submit an image and wait for a short moment for TinEye to find out where it comes from, and if there are any similar versions of the image.
How do you do a reverse video search using TinEye?
Step 1. Take a screenshot of your video on Windows or Mac computer. (You may refer to the third paragraph of this article to see how to how to do it.)
Step 2. Visit the official website of TinEye: https://tineye.com/. Click on the upload button on the left to upload the image from your computer. Alternatively, you can enter a direct image URL to the search bar.
Step 3. At last, click the blue magnifying glass icon to begin the search.
In my test, I uploaded many screenshots of different videos to see how it works.
TinEye can quickly crawl the web and display the results that I expected. You don’t even have to log in or register to use the tool.
TinEye also claims that it is always private and safe to perform reverse search or search by image because it won’t save any of your behaviors.
2. Berify
Berify can find the video source and any stolen videos/images that might have been uploaded on the Internet.
Using Berify, users can upload images from multiple social media sites and website direct links and then analyze if there are any matches.
The fact is, Berify is using its own proprietary solution, and images are matched against the other video/image search engines such as Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo,Yandex and others.
However, I find out that the search process is not as fast as Google.
How do you a reverse video search using Berify?
Step 1. Use the same process to get a screenshot of your video.
Step 2. Visit www.berify.com, register an account, and then upload an image inside the search bar from your Windows/Mac computer or mobile phone.
Step 3. At last, click on Search and wait for a while for the results to display. All results will be saved in your account dashboard for later retrieval.
The Berify offers a free trial that allows uses to run up to 5 images and find out where they’re being used on the web. The advanced users can choose other paid-for plans.
After signing in to your account, you can get all your automatically saved inside a dashboard.
You will have to wait for the search process of similarity matches to complete, but you can go back to the dashboard to check out the results after a while.
In addition, you can customize the search frequency of the images searched to make sure that the video has not been copyrighted. To get accurate search results, you can add some tags.
3. Shutterstock
Shutterstock website has over 1 billion stock images and videos, as well as millions of other royalty-free photos and videos which are contributed by its loyal users from all over the world.
You could produce high-quality footage with a video editor, register as a contributor on Shutterstock, add metadata (title, description, and keywords) to your video file, upload it for review, and then sell your work.
Unlike the other reverse video search engine services, Shutterstock has a section specifically for users to refine the search results and find videos with no hassle.
Shutterstock is said to use neural networks to analyze the characteristics of the video clips and match their patterns with the uploaded image.
How do you do a reverse video search using Shutterstock?
Step 1. Refer to the guide above to take a snapshot of the video that you want to search on your computer.
Step 2. Go to www.shutterstock.com, then it will automatically direct you to the footage section (see picture below). You can drag or upload the image to the dashboard panel to find similar images and videos.
The maximum image file size you can upload to Shutterstock is 50 MB. Soon Shutterstock will show you a list of videos that match your video clip from numerous collections added by the website contributors.
The search results also show many suggested tags, from which you can choose and filter the search.
However, please pay attention that the monthly subscription for video search is $99.
This service is more suitable for professionals who have frequent needs for searching and retrieval of videos. For novice users, it is better to choose other free online tools.
4. TECXIPIO
TECXIPIO is famous for its high-performance video and image recognition technologies.
If you want to turn the time-consuming manual work of verifying search results into an automated, precise job, try TECXIPIO Reverse Video Search API.
The upside of TECXIPIO is that it uses a powerful digital fingerprinting technology to identify and match a vast number of videos in its database, independent from differentiating IDs, file size, format, resolution, and all other factors.
It will help you perform video reverse search more efficiently and accurately.
TECXIPIO lets users search videos in MP4, MKV, AVI, and WebM format. Compared with the other video search services mentioned above, TECXIPIO is different because it takes a video clip as input and processes all the clips inside it.
Its high-end algorithms and caching mechanisms ensure that you can get the search results without waiting for a long time.
How Can Reverse Video Search Help You?
1. Location Recognition
Imagine that you have recorded a video in a tropical rainforest, but you’re missing a few seconds of usable clips.
Once you upload a frame of your video to perform a reverse video search, you will find similar video clips matching your location and video characteristics, like the thick forest, tropical flowers, mosses, ferns, flying squirrels, etc.
Then you can add the new clips as a complement to your existing footage. As for video content creators and video editors, performing reverse research is helpful.
2. Similarities
You can find the videos featuring certain production-based similarities by doing the reverse image to video search.
For instance, you can find the footage that is shot in similar lighting and color temperature. So when you need to find many clips and compile them, you could make sure the video style looks good.
3. Object Recognition
This feature is useful if your client demands a certain object, color or shape is inside his commercials.
Reverse video search is powerful enough to analyze and detect the plants, animals, and objects inside the video.
It identifies different aesthetics, themes, or color scheme inside your uploaded image and matches it against their data set of videos, and quickly returns many results.
4. Copyright Checking and Video Matching
For example, if you have uploaded a YouTube video reviewing a product, without showing your face or adding a watermark.
A few months later, you are concerned that your video may have been used by others and posted on other channels, this tool can help you check for this.
Reverse Video Search FAQ
Why is Reverse Video Search Important?
News, videos, songs, new discoveries have brought about the information explosion on the Internet.
Sometimes when you come across an interesting music video, you might want to know more about the singer, video creator, the source of the video, and some other related information.
When public relations professionals notice a video that is unrelated to their authentic brands, they can perform a reverse video search to find the roots of the product.
Is reverse video search feasible?
There has not ever been any online tool or engine that can guarantee a 100% success rate when performing a reverse video search.
To get a precise result, the search engines have to index every single frame of the original video.
Say the frame rate of a 2-minute video is 30 frames/second, the search engine will have to store 3600 frames for that video in its database.
Technically speaking, it is impossible to index every video since so many videos are uploaded to the Internet each minute. There is a workaround to do a reverse search for videos.
You can simply use the screenshots from a video file, and perform a reverse image search on them.
Final Thoughts
So far, searching video with video may not be available except for the paid-for services like TECXIPIO through API.
You only need to take a clip from your videos, these tools will find exact matches and similarities to videos. That saves you from the manual work of comparing all results one by one.
For average people, performing the reverse image search is the best small trick to find results that should match your example video.
The keyword search is mainly based on descriptive text to identify and match videos. That method cannot match a large number of results if the videos you are looking for aren’t tagged.
In short, reverse video search overcomes the limitations of keyword search and gives you more accurate results.
So, whatever service or tool you decide to use, it will return with some pretty accurate results for your video requirements.
The different results will depend on the database, the visual search technology, and image matching techniques that are used to analyze and detect similarities.
Which one should you choose? I suggest you try them one by one to see which results are most accurate for your needs.