If you have a blog, post on photo-sharing sites or upload your videos to YouTube, youve probably wondered when and how your media is being used by other people. Regardless of whether its free-to-use media or copyrighted material, the process of tracking it down is the same.

Depending on the type of media youre producing, you can track it in different ways. For our purposes, well break the search into three types: art and photos; writing; and videos.

Tracking where photos and art appear online is pretty easy if you dont mind doing it manually. The web app TinEye provides a simple reverse image search that will track anywhere your image turns up online. All you need to do is upload your image and TinyEye will search to see if it appears anywhere else online. Googles own Search by Image will do the same thing.

Less helpful but still useful is your image hosts built-in stats page. If youre using any of the big image-hosting sites such as Picasa (views), Photobucket (Home > Stats) or Flickr (Your Stats), youll find a statistics page showing when people link to your images. Provided someone is linking and crediting your image, youll see where its coming from.

Tracking down your written words is a bit tricky. The simple and automated method is to create a Google Alert with your name, but thats only going to show up when someone is linking to your writing with your name included. The other easy method is to set up trackbacks on your blog so you can tell when people link to you. If your blog doesnt support trackbacks (or youre not using a blog format) you can use Googles Webmaster Tools for free. Once Webmaster Tools is set up, click Traffic > Links to see who is linking to you.

Of course, not every usage of your writing media is going to link back to you. To find out where your words might also be appearing, you can use a copy search engine like Copyscape. In Copyscape you paste the URL you want to check and Copyscape will pull up any links that are identical. You can also sign up for the automated service Copysentry that does the same thing for $US4.95 a month.

Tracking where your videos turn up online is remarkably easy and built right into the two major video-sharing platforms, YouTube and Vimeo. You can check where traffic comes from and where the video is embedded.

For YouTube, click your account name in the top right corner, select Video Manager and click the Analytic button. Here youll find the traffic of all your videos and a breakdown of where that traffic comes from. To find out where the video is embedded, select the video you want to track and then click the Analytics button. Select Playback locations, then click on the Embedded player on other websites link. Here youll find every site that has embedded your video.

For Vimeo you need a paid Plus membership to see where you videos are embedded. Click Me > My Stats > Advanced stats > Embed. Here youll see where your videos have been embedded.

Whether youre curious as to how your freely available media gets used, or if youre trying to hunt down someone breaking copyright, the above tips should get you on your way. We werent able to find a good way to track down how music is used save for a Google Alert or a stores built-in statistics tool (the online store Bandcamp, for instance, gives you a breakdown of incoming links), but if you have some ideas (about music or any other media) please share them in the comments.

The rest is here:

How To Keep Track Of How Other People Are Using Your Media Online