When I started graduate school at Columbia University, one of our first ethics lectures was about the advent of digital photography. What did we think about this brand-new technology? How might it someday change the way we do journalism? What did it all mean?

Most of the people in that class, including the professor, predicted the downfall of photojournalism as we knew it. It'd become easy, someday, to doctor photos. In the future, we might even be able to insert a person into a crowd who wasn't originally there - and no one would know the difference.

That lecture was several years back, and while digital photography hasn't signaled a journalistic apocalypse, some of what was said came true. In a very few cases, photojournalists have stretched or even broken standard ethics. Remember that Reuters photo with all that extra smoke?

It took bloggers and other photographers a bit of time to notice the symmetrical patterns of smoke that were likely created with an application like Photoshop. But a new Web tool promises to identify irregularities in photographs published online - and even to help you recognize if those photos have ever been altered.

TinEye is an image search engine that compares the image that you search with all of the other similar images online. From TinEye's site:

Using sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint' for each image that is added to the index. When you submit a search image to TinEye, its fingerprint is analyzed on-the-fly and compared to the fingerprint of every single image in the TinEye search index. The result is a detailed list of websites using that image, or modifications of that image...

Along with exact matches, TinEye can find modifications of the image that you submit, including: crops, colour adjustments, added/removed text, and slight rotations. TinEye can even detect matches where the image itself has been digitally edited or manipulated.

TinEye promises to help you find where the same image appears elsewhere online, any alterations of that image, the popularity and distribution of that image and even what person/ source might have taken it.

So I searched the Reuters image above using TinEye and found 59 results. For the most part, the search returned size variations of the photo - I never found the original before it was doctored. And a lot of the other promised features weren't available - it's also a little difficult to determine what, if anything, has been done to a photo because there are no categories or tags available on the site. But it was still interesting to see the context in which the photo appeared and on which sites.

TinEye is still in beta. They're so far only searching 701 million images, and I'm not yet seeing all of the ways to tell what work has been done. But I'd stay tuned to see how TinEye develops - and how that might enhance your searching experience.

I've talked before about the emergence of voice-based Internet searching...and it's now available not just on the web, but through mobile applications. Image recognition search might just be the next big thing online.

View all of Amy Webb's columns by clicking here.

Amy Webb is a digital media consultant and head of Webbmedia Group, LLC. Find more multimedia tips and ideas at her blog, http://www.mydigimedia.com. Webbmedia Group is a vendor-neutral company. Any opinions expressed about products or services are formed after testing, research and interviews. Neither Amy Webb nor Webbmedia Group or its employees receives any financial or other benefits from vendors.