For the past day or so, I’ve been working on a little web app, and now I’ve released (admittedly barebones) working version of it! It’s called BRISTool (BRIS standing for Batch Reverse Image Search), and it’s built on node.js. You can find it live on Heroku here, and you can also find all the code on GitHub.

The motivation came during a puzzle hunt, where you try to solve as many puzzles as quickly as possible, usually in teams. A couple of us were bashing our heads against a puzzle with a lot of (unlabeled) images that we guessed were important to the puzzle. One of the usual things to do when you have images in a puzzle is to put them into a reverse image search engine like Google Images or TinEye. Doing this for a lot of images at once is quite cumbersome, though, and hence, the idea for this tool came into existence (at least in my mind).

What BRISTool does is pretty simple: take a bunch of images, send each of them to a reverse image search service, and spit out the links to the corresponding search pages. This turned to be a little harder than I thought it would be, but I managed to finish up in less than 24 hours, albeit with a very simple interface and somewhat messy code. Not a bad way to spend a couple days. (I’m blocked on my research project due to external factors, so it’s OK to not be working on it!)