Reverse Image Composer

The reverse image composer takes a photo (local file or URL) and builds optimised search queries for the major reverse-image-search engines. It pre-processes the image into multiple search variants to maximise hit rate.

The toolkit does not host an image index, it composes deep links into the public engines that do. You run the searches in your browser; the composer makes the searches one-click.

Why a composer

Reverse image search is the single most-asked OSINT capability. Every engine has different strengths:

• Google Lens, best general-purpose, especially for objects and text in images.
• Yandex, best for non-Western scenes, outdoor photos, and faces (often beats Google for European / Asian geolocation cases).
• Bing Visual Search, second-best general purpose, sometimes catches what Google misses.
• TinEye, exact-match focus; finds where the same image has appeared even after re-encoding.
• SauceNAO, anime, illustration, art-focused. Useful for identifying source material in a non-photographic case.
• Karma Decay, Reddit-focused; good for tracking memes and viral images.

A typical reverse-image investigation runs four or five engines and merges the results. The composer makes that one button-press per engine.

Search variants

The composer generates four pre-processed variants of your image:

Each variant gets its own deep-link set across all engines. The result is a grid of one-click searches you can fire off in any order.

Multi-variant hashing

The composer also computes:

• pHash, dHash, aHash, wHash, useful for spotting whether two images are near-identical.
• SHA-256 of the bytes, useful for spotting whether two images are byte-identical.

Hashes are a cheap up-front check before a reverse-search. If you already have a candidate match, comparing hashes locally is faster than running another engine.

Bulk-paste links

The composer offers a "copy all links" affordance, every engine + every variant as a flat list. Useful when you want to:

• Open them all in tabs at once (with a browser extension).
• Send a colleague a complete search-set.
• Save the search set as part of an investigation profile.

What the composer does not do

• It does not run the searches. You click each link; the search engine runs in your browser. The composer constructs the URLs.
• It does not scrape engine results. All result interpretation happens in your browser, manually.
• It does not upload your image to ZeroTrace. The image stays on your machine. The image is uploaded to the search engine only when you click the link, that upload goes from your browser directly to the engine.

Pivots

Sources

Every engine the composer constructs links for is named in the result. Click-through is to the named engine; no intermediary, no proxy. The image you upload (when you click) goes from your browser to the engine over the engine's TLS connection.