Every entrepreneur knows that, in the business world, Time is of the essence, and every minute you overspend is an opportunity for your competitor to get ahead.
That is why many of the digital applications and tools are intended to optimize every moment that each job takes. From spelling correctors to email and contact management tools, they were designed to save you as much time as possible while engaging with your customers and generating the content your business needs.
But there is one aspect that is often overlooked and, if you think about it, often slows down the activities of copywriters, designers or the marketing team: image search.
You’d think that just doing a Google image search would satisfy whatever you need to find the right visual support for your slides, the right photo for the post or blog post, and the right image for the page or flyer you want. is being designed.
However, with so many images uploaded on the web, one could spend several minutes placing different words in search engines and surfing through hundreds of images until one finds the one one is looking for, and when one finds it, it may not even be the size or appropriate exemption or is protected by copyright.
That is why more and more companies and entrepreneurs are using APIs that help them automate the search to find in the shortest time possible the image they need for their projects that has the right size and extension and, if possible, that also allow a reverse search to find your source and find out if it is copyrighted.
We have different options to choose from, because the more images and new file extensions are invented, the more up-to-date and efficient these APIs must become to meet companies and designer’ needs.
Below, we have provided a list of the three APIs that are being used the most lately.
The first thing that strikes you about Reverse Image Search API is its simplicity, being able to be used by the most beginner user. However, as you get proficient, you will discover more and more advanced features that will provide you a better filter search.
Just by pasting the URL, the Reverse Image Search API allows you to discover the first source of an image in no time, a necessary piece of information for those who need to verify if a photo is protected by copyright.
By knowing all the previous uses that the image has had, you can verify if it has been modified, something very useful for fact-checking fake-news. This option is also widely used to verify the identity of a person, applying a reverse search of their profile picture to make sure they are not a scammer.
Due to its high reliability, global geotargeting capabilities, and customizable pricing, ScraperAPI is an excellent solution for developers who need to surf through Google, Amazon, and other popular sites for images.
It can also be used to extract data from a website or application that uses a large amount of multimedia, being able to transform this data into HTML, JPEG or directly into text.
Like many other automated search tools, ScraperAPI also offers different plans depending on the number of calls, but probably the most interesting thing is its ability to customize the plan, paying only for the number of calls as well as the concurrent threads.
Bing Visual Search is Microsoft’s way of entering the image search API market. Launched in March 2014, it initially functioned exclusively as a reverse picture search website.
With the help of this tool, those who work in the marketing areas can search for different photos to discover their different online sources. This is very useful to know if the competition is already using a similar image.
The good thing about Bing Visual Search is that it has had a mobile application since 2016, which can also be used from the cell phone. However, it is only compatible with Apple devices.
There are many other options to choose from, but starting with the ones mentioned above, you can get an idea of how much easier image search can be by incorporating a reverse image search API into your daily tasks. The next step would be to choose one and start exploring its features.