Google Labs has been putting together some great new search technology lately. They just introduced Social Search, and now the Similar Images feature has graduated from Labs and become a permanent part of Google Image Search. When you search for an image, you'll see "find similar images" links below most of the results: clicking it gives you a pretty accurate collection of images of the same subject.

I tested out similar images on some easy stuff (umbrellas) and some tougher stuff (celebrities), and found that it worked really well. Similar Images is good at matching backgrounds, and even manages to find similarly-posed photos if you're searching for an animal or a person. It obviously doesn't do as well when the subject is obscure or abstract, or there aren't a lot of photos of it in the database. In cases like that, it'll be more likely to match your image's color scheme than to find a picture of the same person or thing.

Similar Images isn't made to find identical images hosted on different sites. If you're trying to determine where an image came from, try putting it into TinEye instead.

Intro: Off the Clock is something we've kidded about in our newsroom for a while. The plan: write up some apps that aren't quite made for the 9-to-5(ET) RSS feed. Nothing serious, just harmless, grown-up, after hours stuff.

It's pretty rare that you can tell a software developer is totally up front about what truly motivated him or her to develop an application. In the case of Pr0nSpider, however, it's painfully clear to anyone who's been in his situation that he's being straight up with us.

Any technician I've ever met is all too familiar with the "thems not my pr0ns" speech. Born of the frustration caused by yet another "I dunno how my PC got so screwed up, dog" phone call, Pr0nSpider aims to keep your clueless-but-horny pals from getting into trouble. Well, at least from getting their Windows PC in trouble.
Here's how the magic happens. Fire up Pr0nSpider and select some categories (like the Jeopardy-esque Potpurri). Press go, and it springs into action, hoovering the appropriate inappropriate images from a handful of well-known sites. They're automatically dumped into Program files\Pr0nSpider\Output (or Program files x86\... on 64-bit Windows).

Google's image search is one of the fastest ways to find a picture of just about anything, but that doesn't mean you can use all of the images you find on your website or blog. We've shied away from finding images for Download Squad on Google Image Search in the past, because it's hard to find and credit the creator of the image and be sure you have permission to use it. Google just made it a lot easier, though, by adding the option to search for Creative Commons-licensed images.

The terms of Creative Common licenses vary, but if you go to "advanced image search," you can choose to filter images by the reuse and modification privileges their licenses allow. If you search for Creative Commons images, Google will also throw in other images that are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation license or in the public domain. Google says it's still a user's responsibility to click through and verify that the licensing information is actually correct, but that's still a lot easier than sifting through thousands of image results yourself, looking for one you can use.

Twitter being the public communication platform that it is, where anybody is free to follow anybody else, leaves room for some interesting ways to use the information that people are passing around. For example, Twitcaps is a site that aggregates the links to photos that people post, and puts them together into a grid for easy browsing. You can view the pictures sorted by Newest Images or Most Popular.

Newest Images tends to be more interesting if you're looking to see a cross-section of what people are randomly posting links to, whereas Most Popular tends to be pictures of celebrities, since presumably these are more likely to be reposted by their fans.

When viewing the grid, you can mouse over any image to see the content of the tweet where it originated, and clicking on an image pops up a larger view. For the truly voyeuristic, there is an option to auto-refresh the page.

Of course, probably the most interesting function in Twitcaps is the ability to search for specific words, hashtags or users. The results may not always be what you're expecting, but it can be fun to see what comes up when you put a particular search term in.

Though I haven't come across any offensive material, keep in mind that the images displayed in Twitcap are random pictures being linked to by random people. Hey, it's the internet - browser beware.

Online photo sharing site Flickr offers a tool for uploading images and videos. But the Flickr Uploadr doesn't let you keep your photos synchronized with desktop folders the way that the third party FlickrSync does.

You can configure FlickrSync to watch specific folders on your Windows desktop and sync them up with your Flickr account. In other words, whenever you add files to the desktop folders and hit the sync button, they'll be sent to Flickr. If you delete the images from your local folders, they can be removed from Flickr when you hit the sync button again (although you can configure the application never to delete photos from Flickr).

FlickrSync offers only one-way synchronization. While changes made on your desktop will be reflected online, making the program an excellent tool for managing your Flickr photosets, FlickrSync will never delete photos stored on your desktop. While two-way synchronization might be a nice feature to have, my guess is the developer didn't want to have to deal with angry users complaining that the program deleted their only copies of prized photos.

[via MakeUseOf]

With all the hoopla over Apple's approval process for iPhone apps, it's nice to see them make a sensible decision about a feature they could have nitpicked. Cooliris, a slick image-viewing app we've covered before, recently added an option to adjust SafeSearch settings for Google images. That means you can view NSFW image search results on your iPhone in one of the best-looking gallery interfaces around.

This is a big win all around. Although Cooliris is great for galleries on social sites like Facebook, being able to display Google Images results is one of its best features. Now users who don't want to see NSFW images still don't have to, but now users who want to see them have that option. Other features in the latest version of the Cooliris iPhone app include bookmarking sites and RSS feeds, and sharing via Twitter.

[via Webware]

Gmail may be used by millions of people every day. But as we're constantly reminded, the service is still in beta and lags behind other webmail services in some rather baffling areas. Case in point, up until yesterday there was no simple way to embed an inline image in a Gmail message. Today you can, by enabling the "Inserting images" feature in Gmail Labs.

In order to insert an image you'll have to have "rich formatting" turned on. Once it is, you should notice an image icon squeezed between the emoticon and link icons. Click it and you can upload an image to post in the body of your message. That's it.

Now can somebody explain to me why this is in the experimental "labs" section instead of being a standard update to the Gmail interface? Maybe it needs more testing, but really, Gmail has been around for 5 years. You'd think Google would have been able to work out the kinks in this feature by now.

Ginipic is a desktop utility for Windows that lets you search for images from Flickr, Google Images, Yahoo! Images, SmugMug, deviantArt, Live Search, Picasa, Photobucket, Facebook, and Fotolia. You can search for pictures from a single source, a list of favorites, or all source at once.

You can also use Ginipic to search for photos on your desktop. By default it will search your My Pictures folder in the My Documents area, but you can choose any directory to search. When you click on an image in the search results a preview window shows up to show the image. From this window you can email the image, copy it, set it as your Windows desktop background, save the image, or mark it as a favorite. You can also see it in the original context, which means Ginipic will open the web page or desktop folder where the image was originally found.

Ginipic can be docked to the side of your display or you can minimize the application or set it to float like any other Windows program. You can also maximize the program to view a wall of images.

[via Go2Web20]

Cooliris is an awesome web browser plugin that lets you search and browse for images and videos from Flickr, YouTube, and a handful of other sites from a central hub. But what if youw ant a Cooliris-like wall of pictures without installing yet another add-on for your browser?

CoolFlick is a web page that provides some of the functionality of Cooliris. But there's nothing to install. Just visit CoolFlick, type in a search term, and browse through the photos of cats, computers, or landscapes, or celebrities to your hearts content. You can click anywhere on the screen and drag the wall of pictures, or you can click on an image to make it larger. If you want to visit the original page, just click the box and arrow icon that shows up when you select an image.

If you want to browse videos, Google Images, Amazon listings, or other sites, you'll still be better of with Cooliris. But if you just need a quick fix of some pretty pictures in a pretty interface, CoolFlick might do the trick.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Embedit.in provides a drop dead simple way to embed documents or images on a web site. Just upload a Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF document or an image file and click the embed it button.

You'll need to login to the site before getting your embed code, but you can login using your Google, Yahoo!, AOL, or OpenID information.

The service creates a Flash widget that visitors to your web page can use to view the image or read the document. You can resize the images or click the button in the bottom right corner to view them in full screen. I've embedded a blank tax document after the jump in case you want to see what the widget looks like in action.

Embedit.in is far from the only service that lets you upload documents and embed them on web sites. But it's certainly one of the simples to use.

[via TechnoSpot and MakeUseOf]

Locating real royalty free images on the web can be a real pain in the tuckus. Thankfully, Paul Sherman has assembled a massive collection that he's happy to share with all comers.

WPClipart currently boasts 23,872 public domain images covering just about every subject imaginable. Most are offered as lossless PNG files.

You can browse or search for images on the site, and the five main categories (animals, holidays, history, signs and symbols, and cartoons) are available as individual downloads.

If you'd prefer to grab everything in one fell swoop, the entire collection is available as a single download. It weighs in at about 740mb and can also be downloaded from Freeware Files.

The full download also includes WPClipper, a handy viewer/editor application. It's also available on its own from the downloads section.

[ via gHacks ]

Here's a gallery of the highlights: basic pages, Options, menus, and a few Google services all running smoothly. The key: speed. We haven't seen speeds like these... ever! Be sure to check out Jason's full review in the post below this one.

PDF Image Extract is a free Windows utility that does exactly what the name suggests: it extracts images from PDF files. Sure, you could save pictures one at a time the old fashioned way by hitting print screen and pasting the image into an editor or using a screen capture program. But PDF Image Extract saves you a lot of time if you want to save multiple images because it will save every single image in a PDF file for you. In fact, you can create batch jobs to save images from multiple documents.

The only down side? I'm not kidding when I say PDF Image Extract saves every image. You'll likely wind up with a folder containing hundreds of images, only a few of which are the ones you were looking for. That's because the program will save all sorts of segments of the original PDF as image files, including the background.

[via gHacks]

If your site uses thumbnail images, but you're still opening a separate tab or a separate window to show the larger version, you need to see this: FancyZoom is a little bit of Javascript used by Cabel Sasser on both his personal site and the Panic website, to zoom images inline. Cabel describes the effect as "Mac-like," which is about as accurate a description as you can get. It feels like it should be part of Safari, but it works just fine in other browsers, too.

FancyZoom is a more compact alternative to other zooming effects you might be familiar with, like Lightbox or That Thing Apple Uses on Apple.com. It can be added to a site using only 2 lines of HTML, and it doesn't require any additional libraries. You can also use FancyZoom on a text link to an image, instead of a thumbnail, which could definitely come in handy for some blog layouts we've seen.

[via JoshSpear]

If you ever wanted to make a tiled background pattern for your desktop or website but lacked the design expertise to create one, bgpatterns has you covered.

The site is very straight forward and easy to use. Start off by selecting the foreground and background color for your design, followed by the texture of your canvas. Once you have that dialed in you're ready for the next step which is selecting the image you want tiled.

After you've selected your image click the "apply background" link and the site's background will change so you can see if you like your design. If you're satisfied with the results you're free to download it or save it to your "My patterns" account.

While bgpatterns offers a number of stock images, it does lacks the option to upload your own custom image. Hopefully the developers will add this option in the future as the selection of images are rather "clip artish".

So if you've been looking at making a skull themed background for your MySpace page bgpatterns is ready for you!