Toronto-based Idee Inc. has announced the addition of The European Pressphoto Agency, Matrix Photos, Capital Pictures and Feature Flash to the client roster of PixID, the image-monitoring service that helps owners track image use in print publications. Idee currently monitors the use of 25 million editorial images, performing 55 trillion image comparisons per month.

PixID was launched in 2007 to service leading news, celebrity and entertainment agencies. Other clients include Agence France-Presse and Masterfile. According to Idee, the benefits of using its PixID service include accurate identification of image usage, recovery of revenue lost to unauthorized uses, verifying license compliance and determining return on investment.

The service uses Idee's digital fingerprinting process to compare client inventories of editorial images with scanned versions or digital copies of newspapers and magazines. PixID can identify image use, even if shots have been altered by cropping, rotation or color changes. The system's reporting feature offers precise details of how images appear on print pages. Rick Wysocki, EPA director of North American sales and marketing, said the daily PixID reports are astounding in their accuracy.

Idee says PixID is an automated solution that replaces many of the in-house manual processes and adds efficiency. According to the company, PixID identifies some 15% more image uses, eliminates human error and reduces operational costs of image tracking and publisher invoicing.

Idee's related technology, the recently launched image-search engine TinEye, is currently in private beta, though new users can request an invitation. Similar to PixID, TinEye allows a user to upload and image and find instances of online use.

TinEye is the first online search technology not dependent on keywords. Idee is expanding its functionality by adding user-requested features, such as the six new blog widgets rolled out this week. The engine continues crawling the Internet to index images posted online. Earlier this month, the number of images indexed thus far was around 700 million, all searchable by users in under a second.