Provide Image Search Configurations for Browser Search Engines

Ryonia

Web browsers offer the option to search for images on a search provider via a context menu on images, sending the said image to them.
This uses the search engine settings to do this, however Kagi doesn't offer any documentation as to how to configure this.
This is the relevant section I'm referring to for a browser called Vivaldi:

Using something like 'https://kagi.com/images?q=%s' will not work, and looking at the other default search engines with settings configured for image searching, they do things by uploading the file to the search engine. This is preferable as when just passing along a url, Kagi may not have access to the url and the image stored there.

Could we see some instructions on how to do this please, or if it isn't currently possible with Kagi's setup, have it made a feature please?

Vlad

Ryonia

What you wrote should work if the browser correctly passes the URL.

I just tried with your images and it works fine.

https://kagi.com/images?q=https://kagifeedback.org/assets/files/2023-09-23/1695436422-15015-image.png

Are there any other browsers other than Vivaldi that allow this?

Ryonia

Vlad

Looking into this Firefox, Edge, Chrome don't have this feature, and as such don't allow you allow you to set the image search url.

Vivaldi doesn't seem to pass on the url either as the query. %s is an empty value. I have a feeling it was maybe designed expecting to upload via the POST Parameters.

warpspin

On Firefox, this is usually done through an add-on. https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image is the most popular one with 250k installations. Oh, and it already supports Kagi: https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image/blob/main/src/engines/kagi.js

KamilKurde

@Ryonia it appears to be working when you use https://kagi.com/images?q={google:imageURL}&reverse=reference (source) as image URL (with empty POST parameters) for most cases, but as you said:

Kagi may not have access to the url and the image stored there.

Which is indeed the case, and eg. searching for images from reddit (on the post list, not in the post details) will yield no results (eg. for this post preview URL is https://preview.redd.it/somethingaiwillneverreplace-v0-c9958wjwnv3d1.png?auto=webp&s=83184ccbc4522446bce29c6ee658e944559efa72 and using it in search gives no results, but after going into post details the URL of the image is https://i.redd.it/c9958wjwnv3d1.png , and using it in search does return releveant results)