TinEye is a slick "reverse lookup" tool that helps you find similar images from a source. It's the kind of thing that would be handy to be able to access from your browser's context menu: see an image you want to search, right click it, and get your results!

Firefox users have been able to add this functionality for a while [addon link], and now Google Chrome users have an option as well. A new extension adds a TinEye-powered 'search similar' entry to your Chrome context menu. You can see it popped up on my glorious foreground image of Earthworm Jim -- and TinEye's bevy of similar images peeking out around the edge.

I can see myself using TinEye reverse search quite often, really -- to find a higher-quality version of an image, for example. It's a welcome power-up for my right clicks.

 

There's a lot of bandwidth being wasted every single second, and Google thinks they've got a pretty snazzy new way to tackle part of the problem. Behold! The new WebP image format!

Following in the freshly-trampled footsteps of its video cousin WebM, Google claims that average savings of about 40% over a comparable JPEG can be achieved. Curiously, the image they chose to provide CNet as an example only saved about half that.

Either way, smaller images filesizes would lead to faster Web page loading times, and a faster Web makes everyone happy, right? There's one downside, however -- encoding in WebP takes about 8 times as long as JPEG. I'm not sure I'd even notice the difference, since eight times the fraction of a second it takes Paint.Net to save a JPEG is still a fraction of a second.

If you find yourself getting all tingly-like waiting to take a look at WebP in action, you won't be waiting long. Google says native support is coming to Chrome "in a few weeks."

Overheard on our team chat: "Anyone remember JPEG2000? Lol."

 

There are still a couple features that keep GMail from "feeling" like a desktop email client, but Google obviously has their sights set on making it perform as much like a native app as possible.

Recently they added drag-and-drop file attachments, and now they've extended that ability to image insertion. Need to remind someone it's peanut butter jelly time? Grab your favorite dancing banana and pull it in to the message window! You'll see a brief animation while your image is uploaded and processed.

Both JPEG and PNG are supported, though you can only drag one image at a time -- at least in my testing. If you've managed to select and drop multiple images, let us know in the comments!