Media Literacy

Have you ever seen someone post a piece of news to social media and wondered if the pictures used in it were real or accurate? Maybe you've read an story or an article online and are wondering if the images in it are actually representing the events the story claims to have taken place.

If you ever want to track down the origin of an image (and perhaps see if credible outlets are reporting that an image was manipulated), then reverse image searching may be the tool for you.

Step One: Save Your Image or Copy Its URL

Save/download the image or copy the url of the image you are examining. For our purposes, we're going to use this older viral image of a "rainbow owl" from Pinterest:

Step Two: Locate Google Lens

Go to Google.com. On the right-side of the search bar, you should see a camera icon (beside the microphone icon). Click on it. 

Step Three: Upload Your Image

You'll see the screen below. Upload your image file, drag and drop the image or paste the image url into the search box and press "Search". 

Step Four: Check Your Results and Adjust Your Image Focal Area as Needed

You'll see a screen that shows your image with some crop marks that have focused in on what Google Lens has deemed to be the focal area of your image. It will automatically try to crop out sections of the image that it believes are "noise" or are otherwise unimportant to what you are trying to match. Underneath your image (or to the side, depending on your screen size) you'll see what Lens has decided are likely visual matches.

Pay close attention to the grey text options that say "Visual Matches", "Exact Matches" and "About this image". Before diving into those, though, let's take a look at the page itself. Because of our search, we are seeing immediate results that show a variety of species of owls--although none at the top of our page look exactly like ours in terms of color. There are similar matches in terms physical attributes outside of color (specifically for the Barred Owl).

If we were looking for an exact match and were wondering where this image came from, those first few results wouldn't cut it. But scrolling down to the "Visual Matches" section yields much more promising results. Specifically:

• Our original Pinterest page
• A Snopes page titles "Is This a Photograph of a Rainbow Owl?"
  • For context, Snopes.com is a fabulous fact-checking site, particularly for popular media  

So our image as is ended up working. If it hadn't, however, we could have adjusted the white crop marks surrounding the owl to adjust what areas of the picture that Google Lens was looking fro a visual match--with a smaller crop indicating that you want Lens to focus on that specific element of the image and a wider crop indicating that more of the image is important to your search than was originally included.

Example of a closer crop and its search:

Example of a wider crop and its search:

Step Five: Check out the "About this image" Tab

If you're wanting to learn more about the image itself--it's history, what other sources may be saying about it, whether or not it is misrepresented--then the "About this image" tab may cut through all the noise and take you to the article that will give you your answer. While you can see this for our owl example, I'm also including an example from an image on social media that claimed to be from Covid-19 protests in Berlin from 2020 but was actually from a techno-music street parade in Zurich from 2018 and was fact-checked by a few credible outlets.

Keep in mind when using this tool that if you don't know the trustworthiness of the first few results, that there is a "More Pages" option you can select. For our second example, this gave us the options of PolitiFact and Snopes.