reverse-trace

name

reverse-trace

description

Identify the source of an image or video frame — TV show episode, movie scene, geographic location, or original publication. This skill should be used when the user asks to identify where an image is from, trace a screenshot back to its source, geolocate a photo, find what show or movie a frame is from, or do a reverse image search. Chains Google Vision, Picarta geolocation, and Gemini in parallel with graceful degradation. Triggers on: reverse image search, identify source, what show is this, where was this taken, trace image, identify video, what movie, which episode, geolocate photo, image source.

Reverse Trace

Identify the source of images and videos by running multiple reverse search APIs in parallel and synthesizing results into a confidence-ranked report. Each engine contributes a different signal — web entity matching, AI geolocation, multimodal LLM identification — and the orchestrator merges them because no single API reliably covers all identification scenarios.

Prerequisites

At least one API credential must be set. Missing keys cause the orchestrator to skip that engine, not crash.

Engine	Env Var	Free Tier	Signal
Google Vision	GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS or ADC	1K/mo	Web entities, matching pages, similar images, best-guess labels
Picarta (geospy)	PICARTA_API_KEY or GEOSPY_API_KEY	Yes	Lat/lng, city, country, confidence score
Gemini	GOOGLE_API_KEY or GEMINI_API_KEY	Yes	Media type, title, season/episode, characters, actors

To set up Vision ADC: gcloud auth application-default login

Workflow