Guidelines and Best Practices
- Missing Reference Information (APA Style Guide Guidance)This link leads to a useful APA Style Guide chart that breaks down how to cite an image if a specific element of the reference information is missing. While this chart isn't made specifically for image citation, most of it does translate. For example, you can think of the image creator as the author. So, if the creator of the image is missing, you can follow the guidance of the chart for a missing author.
Reserve Image Searching
- TinEyeTinEye is a free reserve image searching tool. I highly recommend that you review my example and the "How to Use TinEye," guide offered on the website before using this tool. While TinEye is a great tool, it doesn't always work. So this is not a full-proof solution to tracking down image creators.
- Google Reserve Image SearchGoogle Reserve Image Search allows you to find similar images to the one you are using and
TinEye Example:
The first step in doing a TinEye reserve search is to go to the homepage of the website. TinEye gives you the option to upload an image from your computer or to copy and paste a URL for an image (See the screenshot below to see what the homepage search bar looks like).
For this example, I did a Google Image search for, "Eclectic home design". From the search, I chose the image I have copied and pasted below.
The next step is to go to the TinEye website and either copy and paste the link into the search box or upload the image from my computer. I chose to upload the image from my computer but, either option should work for you. From that search, I received a HUGE amount of search results (see the screenshot below).
From this point, I would scroll through the search results to trace the use of this image and its original creator/user.
Reverse Google Image Search:
The first step is to go to the Google Image Search webpage. Once you get there, you should see a homepage that looks like the screenshot below. When you get to the homepage, click on the camera icon located in the search bar. Then, you should see a pop-up box that will prompt you to paste in an image or paste in an image URL (see the second screenshot below to see what this looks like).
For this example, I used the same image that I searched with for the TinEye example. When I searched for this image, I received search results of images that are similar to the one I searched for, and search results for webpages that contain the image I searched for. Follow this link to search what my search results looked like.