Id�e's super Multicolr gets Creative Commons awesomeness

by Nik Fletcher Oct 28th 2008

Back in July, Jay linked to the rather awesome Multicolr service that lets you select up to 10 colours using the colour-picker on the page [selecting a colour more than once to add some bias should you wish] and the Multicolr app goes away and does its thing. 'Its thing' was, back in July, a search of the Interesting photos that make it into Flickr's Explore pages.

How times have changed. Just three months later, the colour search has a 10 million strong database of Creative-Commons photos the Idée Inc. folks have indexed from Flickr using their own 'visual similarity technology' and Multicolr now presents you with a grid of 50 matching CC-licenced photos. And yes, you read it right: that's 10 million Creative Commons-licenced photos indexed.

After playing with this new version of the mashup I'm still astounded - both by how the mashup works now [with a far larger image pool that previously], and by potential further uses. Multicolr, with perhaps tag-refinement for helping you find just the right photo subject, would be image-search nirvana - no doubt Idée [and I daresay Flickr] must be aware of this.

Tags: color-picking, colors, colours

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