Many competitive intelligence insights will often be available if online images and photos are analysed properly. Employees of competitors, and other people, routinely upload images of shops, logistics facilities, factories and so on, both internal and external images.. Photos of staff at a competitor’s event can also provide much useful information if properly analysed.Increasingly, especially with the growth of a Facebook culture, there are more and more photos being uploaded by workers of company parties, their day at work and so on. It will often be possible to find uploaded images of products that have yet to be officially announced, and in those cases the images can be an early indicator of what the competitor is doing.

PowerPoint slides are a natural destination for the kinds of competitor images and photos that are found online, and they can bolster the points being made in the text of such slides. Images obtained online can be a much more cost effective and less resource intensive alternative to traditional primary intelligence. Unfortunately, there is often a lot of effort required in searching for such photos because they do not come with the type of text that is more common in traditional content. In those cases, a good alternative to the text against which searches are normally executed, would be the tags and image descriptions which will be attached to the uploaded images.. Images can be accessed for quicker analysis by downloading them using RSS to a desktop client, avoiding the need to click through pages and pages of online photo content.

Search services to use for this come in two main categories. One will be the established web search websites, starting with Google. They will all include sections devoted just to image search. Also websites like Flickr and the lesser known Panoramio are specifically dedicated photo search websites.

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