Agent skill · research science · aiskillstore
find-the-original-image
Reverse image search across Yandex, Google Lens, Bing Visual Search, TinEye and Baidu to find where a picture came from and who published it first. Use when reverse image searching, identifying a photo, face, logo, product, uniform or building, tracing a profile picture or avatar, finding the oldest copy of an image, checking whether a photo is stock or a repost, or reverse-searching a video by keyframes. Applies to romance and investment scam investigation, fake-profile and synthetic-identity detection, disinformation and media verification, counterfeit and brand-infringement work, and insurance claim review. Reference at useosint.com/skills/find-the-original-image.
Why this skill is useful
Provides domain-specific knowledge on using multiple reverse image search engines effectively to trace image provenance.
What it needs
About 8k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-07. 405 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
Find the original image The goal is almost never "find a match". It is find the earliest publication and read its page. A match tells you the image exists elsewhere; the earliest page tells you the photographer, the date, the caption, and the names — which is what you actually pivot on. The beginner mistake: uploading the full frame to one engine, getting nothing, and concluding the image is unindexed. Cropping to one distinctive object and re-searching finds things full-frame search cannot. Pick your engine by what you are holding You have Start with Why --- --- --- A face Yandex Its index is built around facial similarity, so it returns different people who look alike and the same person in other photographs. No other general engine does this. A face, and Yandex fails A dedicated face engine (see below) Only after you have cleared the legal and consent questions. A street scene outside North America / Western Europe Yandex Deeply indexed Russian, Central Asian, Eastern European, Turkish and Chinese web content that Google under-crawls. A product, book cover, artwork, plant, animal Google Lens Object and entity recognition, tied to Shopping and Knowledge Graph. Text inside the image Google Lens It OCRs the frame and lets you search the extracted string. Often the text is the answer and the image search is irrelevant. A landmark or a well-known building Google Lens Landmark classification is its strongest single feature. A specific region of a cluttered photo Bing Visual Search Draw a box on the uploaded image and it re-searches only that region — the fastest crop-and-retry loop of any engine. A press photo, meme, or anything you suspect is old TinEye The only major engine that sorts by oldest and that reliably surfaces modified copies. Chinese-language or China-hosted content Baidu image search Coverage the others simply do not have. Run at least three. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills aiskillstore/find-the-original-image