image search posts

Filed under: Photo, Web services, Google, Search

Google Image Swirl serves up a tasty blend of related images

by Jay Hathaway Nov 17th 2009

Google Image Search is already a great way to find images from all corners of the Interwebs, and it just got more interesting with a new way of visualizing results. It's called Image Swirl. Searching for an image with swirl will give you a list of 12 images, and clicking on each one brings up a cluster of related pictures. Picking one of those will spin the wheel around and give you even more to look at.

This new way of exploring images may be more fun than it is useful, but it does definitely deliver the goods. If you're a visual thinker, it's probably a quicker way to browse results than the existing "similar images" link in Google Image Search. The underlying technology for Image Swirl comes from Similar Images and Picasa's face recgonition features. If you want to give Image Swirl a spin (har har) it's available in Google Labs now.

[via Official Google Blog]

Tags: google, image, image search, image swirl, ImageSearch, ImageSwirl

Filed under: Internet, Macintosh, Blogging, Web services, Yahoo!, Shareware, web 2.0

Viewfinder brings powerful Flickr search to your Mac

by Nik Fletcher Nov 6th 2009

Every now and then I find myself working on slides in Keynote and writing Download Squad posts - and struggling to find a suitable image. Of course, Flickr is the best way to find images - their clear licencing and Creative Commons support makes finding images fairly straight forward. However, getting the image into Keynote isn't entirely painless. The workflow of browsing search results, viewing the image and then finding it at a suitable size (if it exists) takes time - however that's where Viewfinder steps in.

A native Mac OS X application (requiring Mac OS X Snow Leopard), Viewfinder allows you to search Flickr from the desktop apply filters to show only Creative Commons images, and specify a particular image size. Then, once you select an image you can download the image, set it as your desktop background - and most importantly - send images straight to Keynote for your slides.

If you're a heavy keynote user (or blogger) who frequently needs to find Flickr images for your work Viewfinder is indispensible. I've been testing it since early September and found it an incredibly convenient tool to have at hand. A licence costs £15 (roughly $25) and a free demo is available for you try from the Viewfinder webpage.

Tags: Flickr, Image Search, ImageSearch, Mac OS X, MacOsX, Snow Leopard, SnowLeopard

Filed under: Photo, Web services, Google, Search

Similar Images feature emerges from Google Labs

by Jay Hathaway Oct 27th 2009

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.

Tags: google labs, GoogleLabs, image search, images, ImageSearch, similar images, SimilarImages

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Google

Google Image Ripper: we don't need no stinkin' thumbnails

by Brad Linder Mar 13th 2007

Google Image Ripper is a nifty little Google hack that lets you search for Google Images without surfing through an endless sea of thumbnails.

All you have to do is enter a search term, an image size (icon, small, medium, large, xlarge, or xxlarge), and hit the rip button. The program searches for images that meet your specifications, and loads all the images onto one screen.

Of course, if you're looking for Creative Commons photos that you can reuse, you're still better off searching Flickr. But if you just need to see a ton of pictures of Angelina Jolie or Jeff Raikes, this might be the tool for you.

[via Boing Boing]

Tags: google images, GoogleImages, hack, image search, images, ImageSearch, search

Filed under: Photo, Blogging, Google

Google adds search to Picasa Web Albums

by Brad Linder Mar 8th 2007

Google has gone and added three major updates to Picasa Web Albums. First, any photos you upload to a blog using Blogger will automatically be added to your personal web album. This sort of integration makes a lot of sense, making it much easier to search for and find photos you've previously used on your blog. Of course, Google could have just included an image search feature in the "search this blog" box on blogger.

The other announcements are probably much bigger news for anyone who doesn't use Blogger. The storage capacity for web albums has been bumped up to 1GB. And while yesterday, you could only search for images in your own web album. Today, you can do a "community search," allowing you to search for images across all web albums. It'll be interesting to see if Google eventually ads these images to Google Images search results.

If you'd rather not share your photos with the whole world, you can set your web albums to "unlisted." Not might be a good time to go do that if you weren't aware that your baby photos were suddenly going to be made available to the whole world. Might have been nice if Google had sent out an email to give users a heads up.

Does this mean Google's trying to take on Flickr? It's too early to say. On the one hand, you can easily search for images and view users shared galleries. On the other hand, Picasa Web Albums don't allow users to assign Creative Commons licenses to their images. That means if you're looking for images you can use and/or edit, you're still probably better off searching Flickr.

Tags: community search, CommunitySearch, google images, GoogleImages, image search, ImageSearch, picasa, picasa web albums, PicasaWebAlbums, search

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Google

Google Images restores old design

by Brad Linder Feb 21st 2007

A few weeks ago Google went and changed its design for Google images by cleaning up all that annoying extra data on the screen that you don't need, like the image size and the website where it's located. You could still see that information, but only by scrolling your mouse over the image.

Generally, this made Google Images much less useful. If there are multiple versions of the same image available, it's nice to know which one is the largest at a glance, for example. Or if you're looking for images of a rock band, you might want to know which ones come from the band's official web site.

Now, less than a month after rolling out its site redesign, it looks like Google's reverted back to the older, more informative version of Google images. It's nice to see Google reacting to negative response from users, if in fact that's what they're doing. It's always possible this is just a glitch, or that a new interface could be on its way next week.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

Tags: google images, GoogleImages, image search, ImageSearch

Filed under: Web services, Google

Google dumbs down Images results

by Jordan Running Jan 24th 2007

My friend Ty pointed out to me today that Google has changed the interface of Google Images, and not necessarily for the better. While the old results display for Google Images searches showed a thumbnail of each image along with the host's domain name, the image's dimensions, and a short description (taken from the image's context on the site). Now Google Images only shows the short description unless you move your mouse over one of the thumbnails. For me, this makes the service significantly less intuitive. If I'm looking for, say, a logo that's a certain size, I want to be able to see each image's dimensions at a glance, but with the new interface I have to roll my mouse over each and every one until I find one that's the right size. Similarly, being able to see the hosts of all of the images was handy, especially if you noticed that many of them are served by the same host. But now it's like a puzzle, moving your mouse around until you find what you're looking for.

I'm not sure if this new interface is showing up for all users, as Google is in the habit of testing new interfaces on a small cross section of users, but either way I hope this is an interface change they reconsider. What do you think of the update?

Tags: google, google images, GoogleImages, image search, images, ImageSearch, interface, update

Filed under: Photo, Web services

Like.com Visual Search: Riya finds a business model

by Jordan Running Nov 8th 2006

We've been peripherally interested in Riya, an image recognition slash visual search start-up since we first caught wind of it, but now they've really got our attention. Riya is now testing Like.com, which is basically a shopping search engine with a visual seach twist. "Basically" is a poor way to put it, however, because though the experience isn't exactly jaw-dropping, if you spend some time playing around with it, you can see the potential. Like.com is truly the first of its kind: there's no keywords here, just pure pixels. In its current alpha incarnation, Like.com allows you to browse the products in its catalog--shoes, handbags, jewelry, and watches--visually, meaning you can find an item you like and then find other items that look like it. If you like a certain aspect of an item--the toe on a shoe or the face on a watch, for example--you can highlight just that area and it will find items with similar features. You can also choose which aspects of your search are most important: color, shape, and pattern. While currently you can only search using images already in Like.com's library, Riya plans to add image upload features that, if the Like.com front page is any indication, will allow you to do thinks like upload a photo of a celebrity, highlight his wristwatch, and find it and similar watches around the web.

Like I said, Like.com isn't going to change online shopping today, but the groundwork is definitely there, and it does an impressive job of proving that Riya's image search technology really does work.

P.S. How long before Riya gets into the internet dating business? "Find men in your area that look like Brad Pitt..."

[Via TechCrunch]

Tags: image search, ImageSearch, like, like.com, photo search, PhotoSearch, riya, search, shopping, visual search, VisualSearch

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

View more Time Wasters

Featured Galleries

Defective by Design, London: Protest Pictures

Download Squad at the Crunchies After-Party

Android First-look: Amazon.com MP3 Store

Flickr Pool

www.flickr.com

Download Squad bloggers (30 days)

#	Blogger	Posts	Cmts
1	Jay Hathaway	111	5
2	Lee Mathews	82	24
3	Sebastian Anthony	69	254
4	Brad Linder	39	4
5	Jason Clarke	23	0
6	Dolores Parker	8	2
7	Grant Robertson	6	2
8	Victor Agreda, Jr.	5	1
9	Matt Heerema	4	2
10	Nik Fletcher	4	0
11	Paul O'Brien	2	0
12	John Burke	2	0
13	Download Squad Staff	1	0

More Tech Coverage

Control Shift It's all about the experience
Somewhat Frank Perspectives on tech as it fuses in everyday life
Switched Gadgets, web news and commentary
Urlesque Exposing bits of the web

Download Squad