I was on Twitter today, when the following tweet dropped into my timeline:

https://twitter.com/SRefil/status/681504535320342528

At first glance, it looks genuine – but on closer inspection, you start to think:

• is that didgeridoo standing up on its own?
• the picture of the queen looks all wrong – and would it be permitted anyway?
• are photos allowed to be taken inside prison?

Most of the commenters here either assumed it was real, or were flummoxed, guessing that it wasn’t likely to be genuine, but how could it be proven either way?

Here is the answer:  A nifty little website known as http://www.tineye.com.

All you need to do is right click on the picture, copy the link, then post it into tineye.  In an instant, it finds all uses of the picture, or near approximations of it, throughout the world.  You scroll through the results until you find the culprit.

And in this particular case, it was this:

https://twitter.com/Wirral_In_It/status/682502942457462784

So, the next time you see a picture of David Cameron getting intimate with farm yard animals, before issuing pig-headed denials, you know how to find out if it’s real or not.

@tineye