TraceLens
A visual research workspace for journalists, fact-checkers and documentary researchers: drop in a photo or sketch a scene, and it traces the image to its likely origin, surfaces related visuals across public archives, and links each claim to the source it came from in a visual citation graph.
Investigative journalists, documentary producers and art/design researchers doing visual-source work
- Reverse-trace: upload an image, get a ranked list of likely original sources, mirrored copies, and earliest known appearances with timestamps
- Visual knowledge graph: every photo, document and person connected to the scene appears as a clickable node with source links
- Side-by-side compare pane to place two images next to each other and surface textual references that mention both
- One-click provenance report export (PDF) suitable for attaching to a pitch, a fact-check or an FOI request
SearchEyes shows that multimodal deep-search over knowledge graphs is finally good enough to be useful outside the lab — and the people most painfully underserved by today's 'reverse image search' are the ones who need it professionally.
Multiple 2025 OSINT guides explicitly target journalists/fact-checkers with image verification workflows (e.g., '21 Essential Tools for Image and Video Verification'), showing an active professional user base with documented pain points around current reverse-image-search tools.21 Essential Tools for Image and Video Verification ↗Reverse Image Search OSINT: Find Anyone by Photo (2025) ↗
Crowded point-tool landscape (TinEye, PimEyes, Yandex, FaceCheck, AIGCTrace, Oceanir, Danaya, StoryCraft), but none combine a true visual citation graph + multimodal deep-search workflow tailored to journalistic/documentary research.OSINT Reverse Image Search — Identify people and places | OSINT UI ↗Visual Evidence Verification Plans | Oceanir ↗
Pro pricing tiers exist in adjacent tools (Oceanir pro plan) and StoryCraft markets to paid documentary researchers, indicating willingness to pay, but the addressable market is small and budgets for niche OSINT tooling are modest.Pricing | Visual Evidence Verification Plans ↗StoryCraft: Documentary Research Tool & Legal Verification Platform ↗
Misinformation, deepfakes, and AI-generated imagery are driving durable demand; C2PA/Content Credentials are being shipped by Nikon/Sony/Leica (Sony Camera Verify, June 2025) and the SearchEyes/arXiv line of work shows sustained frontier R&D investment in multimodal deep search.AI Image Provenance & Standards | AI Pro Photography ↗SearchEyes: Towards Frontier Multimodal Deep Search Intelligence via Search World Simulation ↗
SearchEyes-27B demonstrates SOTA open-source multimodal search agents on 6 benchmarks, making the underlying retrieval tractable, but assembling a unified provenance + knowledge-graph + visual citation workspace with archive integrations is still a heavy engineering effort.SearchEyes GitHub Repository ↗