Category: Tips

This photo reminds me of something [or just a small hint on reverse image searches]

Did you know that you can search but instead of text use images?

nice image right? You wished you could learn more about it?
nice photo right? You wished you could learn more about it?

 

This is called reverse image search and might be handful in several cases. For instance when you search for the original creator of a photo, painting, or whatever. In addition, it can also be used to check if a profile of someone contacting you (e.g., through facebook, or a dating site, or whatever you are doing in the Internet :) ) is real or not. On the other hand, it is good to know that someone can also reverse an image and get back to you. So, keep that in mind, whenever uploading photos in the web. Especially, when the algorithms behind reverse image searching are getting better.

How?

Plenty of ways as always. The easiest and quite good one is google. Simply navigate to google and go to images; from there you can simply drag and drop any image and it will search for it. Actually, if you are using firefox, there is even an add-on for this. Simply head to the firefox add-ons website and search for google reverse image.

The next alternative would be TinEye and it’s pretty much straightforward to use too.

Photos, privacy and the weird EXIF data

Did you know that whenever you take a (digital) photo your camera usually saves (in the photo) a bunch of additional private (meta-)data? Most of this can be usually found in the properties of the respective file. An example is show bellow:

 

EXIF data example
EXIF data example

This is called EXIF (i.e., Exchangeable image file format; also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchangeable_image_file_format), and can include the exact camera model, date/time information, and in some cases (depending on the camera, or the smartphone in this case) even GPS data (i.e., the exact place of the photo taken). It is important to remember this whenever we post a photo anywhere in the Internet (whether it’s facebook -well it’s your choice not to do that ;), or a photo from a demonstration in a leftist/anarchist site).

So, how do we remove this?

Windows:

There are plenty of ways including doing it manually. For instance in a Windows machine this can be done by clicking in the properties of the image (also see http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/3-ways-to-remove-exif-metadata-from-photos-and-why-you-might-want-to/) and manually removing everything you can. However, as windows won’t really delete anything, you can also try the plethora of free available tools (just google for “remove exif data”, tools like Easy Exif Delete, etc. should do the trick; yet you should always manually check the properties of the photo afterwards to be sure.

Linux:

In a linux/debian/ubuntu system this can be easily done through many different tools (e.g.,  libimage-exiftool-perl or jhead ; sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl and/or sudo apt-get install jhead respectively).

Finally an alternative way (if you are really picky) is to make a screenshot of the actual photo, save/edit it as you wish, and then (just to be sure) run again an exif removal tool.

 

Reducing your beloved SPAM

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One of reason for the spam you get, are all these websites that, for no particular reason, require a registration – and thus your email. It could be a random forum where you are searching for something or whatever that “offers” “free” registration.

There are two plus one ways you can avoid this:

  1. Well, firstly you can always create one more email just for all these websites.
  2. A sometimes better/faster way is to use bug me not. This is a community-based (in terms of that anyone can add website credentials) site where you can search if the website that is asking you for registration is already there. If there is, you will be given credentials that in most cases work.
  3.  You can use a temporary email account. This is quite different from method (1), since this is really a one-time disposable email. Usually you find a site offering this service, you create an email (just with one click) and immediately use the generated email for the registration. In most cases, you temp email will be “destroyed” after some minutes. There are many who offer this kind of service:

 

 

Please, no more porn adds!

The scenario is pretty common. I am searching for something (torrent or whatever) and I end up in a website where a gazillion of photos of naked women pop up. Except from the obvious (offensive content), in many cases these adds could also harm your computer in a multitude of ways.

Well, no thanks! So this is a really easy way to get rid of them (at least in most cases).

What you need here is called a browser addon. Firstly, a browser is the program you are using for surfing the Internet. There are many options: Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, etc. A first tip would be do not use Internet Explorer, its the worst in every possible way. Anyway, I am using Firefox, mostly because it is quite powerful in terms of addons.

So, if you have Firefox what you need to search for is the Adblock Plus addon and you are done :)

For Chrome users this is pretty much the same, just search in Chrome Web store for the Adblock addon.

On the screenshots you can see an example of the same website with and without the addon (I edited the adds a bit for obvious reasons).