Speaking for myself here but when a maker is pretty obscure and there are just few pics of it online, there is an high probability that it's in my HD.
Furthermore, once I found a nice source, I use to view it all and copy all its pictures in my folders.
There are some sources I recognize at once and some pictures that are very familiar for me.
This is the reason why, once it's been estabilished that a car is, for example a 500cc F3, I know exactly where to look, in my HD or online.
I have a program that I use to sort pictures according to some selected tags and even if there are thousands of pics, once I choose the few tags I need, I'm always seeing the same hundreds of pics. This one showed up hundreds of times: each time I was looking for a 'classic' and a 'British car'.
If you post a picture like the following, for example, I'm in big trouble: there are no distinctive features and it's not an iconic picture of that model. I can determine is an 'American' 'classic' car but the hundreds of pictures I'll see will be all different from it, even if I'm looking at cars of the same brand. In this case I have to study the picture and try to 'recognize it' the usual way.
I can't understand how some puzzlers can find with the same easyness a '32 Dodge or a 1911 De La Myre-Mory!