There are probably a variety of applications for this little hack, but I primarily use it when experimenting with banner images and whatnot on a client site.
I fully intend to buy an image before I use it, but it would be great if my client and I could see what it will look like first – and using a 300px wide image in a homepage banner doesn’t really satisfy.
Here’s how you can get a much bigger preview image (most of the time)
- Find your desired image(s) on a stock photography site (my favourite is bigstock.com)
- Download the preview image (or use something like Greenshot to grab the image from the page)
- Go to http://images.google.com/ and click the little camera icon
- Upload the preview image or screenshot
- Google will show you many instances of that image elsewhere on the web (ie. other people who have bought and implemented that image)
- Browse for the biggest version you can find!
This won’t work 100% of the time, but it probably works more often than you’d expect!