Hey y’all! I’m cavalier about my picture being on the internet, because I kind of have to be in order to build up a presence for my business. But LOTS of you are creeped out by the idea of some rando seeing pics of you online. (I totally get that.)
I crowd-sourced some info about how to make a digital image less reverse-searchable. This is neither comprehensive nor 100% expert backed, but my pals on Twitter dug up some interesting examples and information so I thought I’d share a little round-up of the best tips and tactics! A special thanks to my pal Stanlo, who did a bunch of testing and who seems to have discovered the best Google-flummoxing trick: horizontal flip.
Hey nerds! How does one modify a digital pic so it can’t be found/traced via reverse image search? My clients want to know!
— Virginia Roberts (@askvirginia) January 31, 2015
The cynical take
Don’t even bother trying. You can’t fool the robots, you can only temporarily flummox them. Give in and accept our new overlords.
@askvirginia Fools errand; even if you find something that makes it work now, that would be a bug, and fixed ASAP — Kaz de Groot (@kazdegroot) January 31, 2015
Unfortunately for most of y’all, I think Kaz is dead on here. It’s really, really hard to fool the increasingly smart technical ways people can reverse lookup your pics. It’s best to make your peace with it and only put out pics of you that you could stand having discovered, ya know?
But fear not… next we have the surprisingly effective..
Horizontal flip!
By jove, I think he’s done it!
@askvirginia not a guarantee but horizontal flip has pretty good results lol pic.twitter.com/5Djm35STPO
— ㄅ₮∆иﾚ◊ (@StanloGraphics) January 31, 2015
Here are the images Stanlo had tweeted, for your easier perusal.
Original image search results:
You can see that the exact same image that he searched on is the very first result. Boo.
Horizontally flipped image search results:
Damn! Not a single accurate hit! So that’s kinda promising, right? (Until, as Kaz states, they fix it.)
Strip the metadata
If you’re just worried about stripping out the embedded metadata of the photo file, use a weirdly named app. This tactic is smart for the paranoid and is simple enough to figure out. It doesn’t solve for facial recognition technology, but that’s not as robust as shows like Alias make it out to be. 🙂
@askvirginia There’s apps that can remove the EXIF data. NoImgData is one I use. — Richard J. Anderson (@sanspoint) January 31, 2015
Muck with exposure?
Some folks suggested altering the crop or making the image black and white. No dice.
@arisascott @askvirginia crop by itself is not good enough. I also tried B&W which also fails pic.twitter.com/ClAdHZIGh8
— ㄅ₮∆иﾚ◊ (@StanloGraphics) January 31, 2015
But you CAN crank up the exposure and become the anime princess of your dreams! Yay!
@askvirginia I have the solution, just crank up the exposure!!! pic.twitter.com/dfntAIztCm — ㄅ₮∆иﾚ◊ (@StanloGraphics) January 31, 2015
More technical image tweaks
One person suggested breaking the image into tiles:
@askvirginia break it up into tiles. Deliver tiles to browser, have it reassemble into large pic again. More tiles=harder to search
— Todd Trann (@toddtrann) January 31, 2015
But even that fails, although more tiles + unpersonalized Google search might have produced less obvious results.
@toddtrann @askvirginia check this shit out, google can figure out virginia from just her mouth pic.twitter.com/BxyGRhwndY — ㄅ₮∆иﾚ◊ (@StanloGraphics) January 31, 2015
More complicated image futzing:
@askvirginia One more for you: small images can be converted to JSON. We are doing this to transport digital wet signatures.
— Todd Trann (@toddtrann) January 31, 2015
@hellbox here is a good start in the direction we went: http://t.co/DosTdGNu0e — Todd Trann (@toddtrann) January 31, 2015
Or for some purposes you can rely on the webmaster to handle it via Google Developer Tools, but this isn’t a reliable option for big social media sites.
@askvirginia Isn’t there a block robots option for Google image search on sites? I think that was in their Webmaster Tools.
— Some Josh (@MrBlank) January 31, 2015
My image recommendations
All told, I think the best solution is to be smart about which images you use for which purposes. Looking at the results my friendly Twitter testers produced, it seems like current image search technology relies heavily on the image already existing somewhere. So, for example, if you wanted to post a picture to your online dating profile but not have it be easily look-up-able (shut up), you just wouldn’t use an image that you had already posted anywhere else.
…obligatory reminder that a great way to get a set of diverse, flattering images is to attend one of my Mug Shots events, haha.
Happy posting, whatever pics you use! [icon-heart]
Comments 1
@askvirginia I think you mean “fewer searchable”.