Reverse image search for Nautilus

Nautilus plugin that adds contextual menu entries on image files to do a reverse image search on them using Google or Yandex.

Installation

Arch Linux

Install nautilus-search-by-image-git from AUR.

Manual

Install the python-nautilus or nautilus-python and python-requests or python3-requests packages depending on your distro.

Place the search-by-image.py file in the nautilus-python user or system directory and restart Nautilus.

For example, to place it in the user directory (usually ~/.local/share/nautilus-python/extensions, unless overriden by XDG env var):

git clone https://github.com/jle64/nautilus-search-by-image && cd nautilus-search-by-image
install -D search-by-image.py "${XDG_DATA_HOME-${HOME}/.local/share}/nautilus-python/extensions/search-by-image.py"
nautilus -q

Privacy caveats

When doing a search, your image is uploaded to a file sharing service, in addition to the search engine, so this file sharing service also gets to access the image you're searching. This is done because it's easier to do a reverse image search on a Web file rather than a local one. By default the service used is https://transfer.sh, it be changed by editing the UPLOAD_URL variable.

Troubleshooting

In case of issue, either try to look at your logs (journalctl --user on systemd-based systems) or run nautilus in a terminal after killing it (nautilus -q; nautilus) and see if there is anything relevant.