We compare the results of Infringement.Report, Tineye, ImageRights.com, Plaghunter, Image Raider, and Incandescent.xyz to find which reverse image search monitoring service provides the most comprehensive results.
If you're a photographer or rightsholder with more than a dozen images, ensuring that your images are not being stolen means placing your trust into a tool such as Infringement.Report to monitor the usage of those images. There are plenty of tools around which do this, so when we launched Infringement.Report, we were faced with questions about why we would bother when there are perfectly fine incumbents already doing it cheaper?
Properly protecting your photo catalog requires a view of all of the websites currently using your images. As our testing shows, other services can't come close to our coverage.
We tested Infringement.Report against the five main image monitoring services - Tineye, ImageRights.com, Plaghunter, Image Raider (AKA Incandescent.xyz). We tested one popular image across all of these services to find the number of results returned.
Before revealing the results, some caveats:
- These are one-off tests with single images - these services may perform better with different images, searching at different times, or with more time for discovery/monitoring.
- We used the free versions of all tools (including Infringement.Report), but we don't know if they would have been better on a paid subscription.
If you're an independent blogger/researcher and would like to run your own tests, we will happily give you a free account to do so.
You can see the test details and full data in the Google Sheet
| Domains Found | Results Found | Waiting Time | |
| Infringement.Report | 320 | 519 | 15 Mins |
| Plaghunter | 134 | 183 | 5 Mins |
| Image Raider / Incandescent.xyz | 127 | 180 | 3 Mins |
| Tineye** | ? | 388 | 1.1 Secs |
| ImageRights.com | 161 | 419 | 5 Hours |
In this test, Infringement.Report found more than twice the amount of infringing websites than any other service. Tineye, Plaghunter, and Image Raider were faster than us, but did not find as many infringements.
** As it was not possible to create a data export from Tineye, we were not able to calculate the amount of unique domains found.
You can see the test details and full data in the Google Sheet
| Domains Found | Results Found | Waiting Time | |
| Infringement.Report | 185 | 538 | 10 Mins |
| Plaghunter | 110 | 143 | 3 Mins |
| Image Raider / Incandescent.xyz | 3 | 5 | 6 Hours |
| Tineye** | ? | 51 | 0.6 Secs |
| ImageRights.com | 101 | 402 | 5 Hours |
Again, Infringement.Report found more infringing websites than any other service. ImageRights.com and Plaghunter performed slightly better in this test than the previous one. Tineye and Plaghunter were faster than us, but did not find as many infringements.
** As it was not possible to create a data export from Tineye, we were not able to calculate the amount of unique domains found.
Image infringement monitoring is a resource intensive process - when you first upload an image for monitoring, we try to discover as many infringements as we can right away. This means that we search your image multiple times on every source using our proprietary retrieval method. However, despite having so many results right away, it's still likely that we'll miss some - we'd expect to find another two dozen legacy infringements in the first week of monitoring this image.
After gathering all infringements that we can find, all results go through a robust process to weed out false positives and score the infringing website to ensure that large businesses appear first, and foreign/spam websites can be easily filtered away.
While Infringement.Report is not the cheapest image monitoring service on the market, we care about providing the most comprehensive data. This test has shown that Infringement.Report was able to return more comprehensive data and more infringements in a short timeframe.