Reverse image search is nothing new and we have been writing about newer reverse image search engines for over a decade. What reverse image search does is that it takes an image and looks for identical or similar images on the internet. Depending on the search engines used, we can specify the image either by its online URL or by uploading it from the local computer. All the major search engines like Google and Bing offer very advanced and accurate reverse image searching features. Then there are search engines designed specially for reverse image searching like the TinEye.
While there are more than two dozen such reverse image search engines available, you can access them all from a single spot using the “Search by Image” extension for the Firefox browser. This one extension packs 44 different search engines that offer reverse image search in one form or another. Even though so many search engines are available through this extension, only a few are enabled and it is left to the user to enable or disable them as the user desires.
In order to make changes to the “Search by Image” extension options, we can visit about:addons in Firefox, click on the ellipses icon next to “Search by Image” and choose Options from there. In the screen that appears, you can toggle on or off the search engines. You can choose how the extension is available – through the Firefox toolbar or through the right-click context menu. There are other options, for example, you can choose to use the localized site of Google instead of the main Google site for searching.
There are two ways to use this “Search by Image” extension in Firefox. The easiest is just to click on any image visible on any webpage in Firefox and choose “Search by Image” and hen choose the target search engine. Only the enabled search engines appear in the list. This will open a new tab with the search results.
Another method is to invoke the extension from its toolbar icon. After you click on the toolbar icon for “Search by Image”, you have to pick one of the search engines and then there is an extra step of choosing the image on the webpage. After this a new tab is opened with the search results.
The “Search by Image” extension for Firefox is a really useful extension when you want to do a lot of reverse image searching and want to find results on many different engines.
You can install the “Search by Image” extension for Firefox from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search_by_image/.