ReverseImage.app VS ShellNewHandler

ReverseImage.app's answer

Most reverse image search extensions work by handing the image's URL to a search engine. That breaks on exactly the sites where you most want it: Instagram and Pinterest serve images behind URLs the engines can't fetch, and , blob: and data: images have no shareable URL at all. This extension detects those cases and uploads the image instead, so the right-click works everywhere rather than most places. It also searches Google Lens, Yandex, Bing Visual and TinEye from the same menu — no engine picking, no reopening the menu four times — and adds clipboard paste and region capture for images that aren't on a page at all.

ReverseImage.app's answer

Because the privacy claims are checkable. A plain search never touches our servers — the extension talks directly to the search engine. When a search does need an upload, the resulting link expires after 15 minutes, and once it does nobody can reach the file; the file itself is deleted automatically about a day later. The whole extension is open source under MIT, so you can read the code rather than take our word for it — lib/config.ts lists every server address the extension knows about. Most alternatives in this category are closed source and ask you to trust a privacy policy.

ReverseImage.app's answer

People who need to check where an image came from and hit a wall doing it: OSINT and fact-checking researchers, journalists verifying user-submitted photos, photographers and illustrators looking for unlicensed reuse of their work, and anyone vetting a dating or marketplace profile with a face search. The common thread is that they're already trying to reverse image search and the ordinary right-click has failed them — usually on a social platform.

ReverseImage.app's answer

It started with a broken right-click. Google removed the built-in "Search image with Google Lens" behaviour people relied on, and the extensions that replaced it all failed the same way on Instagram — the one place where checking an image actually matters. Fixing that meant handling the upload path, which meant running a server, which meant deciding what happens to the images people send. That decision is the reason the project is open source: privacy promises about a server you can't see are worth very little, so we published the code that runs it. It's now in Chrome and Firefox in seven languages, with a free web version at reverseimage.app for people who don't want to install anything.

ReverseImage.app's answer

The extension is TypeScript built with WXT, targeting Manifest V3 across Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Opera from one codebase, with Vitest for tests. The backend and marketing site are Rails 8 with SQLite, Propshaft and Tailwind, deployed with Kamal; localization uses route_translator so each of the seven languages gets real translated URLs rather than query parameters.