Although Google has been playing with some fun image search toys in its lab and the official Google Image Search has recently significantly upped its game, some of its most hyped features — color search, instant scrolling, hover preview — are but mere shadows of sleeker, better versions that geekier, more sophisticated image search tools offer. Here are seven of our favorites.

OSKOPE

oSkope is a visual search assistant that lets you browse images and products from popular sites like Amazon, eBay, YouTube and Flickr in a highly intuitive way. You can skim thumbnails related to your search keywords and save search results from different services to a visual bookmark bar at the bottom of your browser screen.

Thanks, Amrit!

COMPFIGHT

CompFight is a Flickr search tool tremendously useful for all your comp stock image needs but also doubling as a visual inspiration ignition engine. It lets you search based on tag or text, spitting out a pleasant wall of thumbnails. Particularly useful: The CreativeCommons search option, which filters results by image rights license type.

CompFight was featured in the Experimental category of this year’s Communication Arts annual.

FLICKR RELATED TAG BROWSER

You may recall Flickr Related Tag Browser from pickings past — a sleek web app retrieves Flickr images tagged with your search keyword in a neat grid, surrounded by a radial display of related tags. Clicking each related tag produces the same grid of images tagged with it, semantically leading you down the endless image tagging rabbit hole.

FRTB is the work of interactive designer Felix Turner, a Flash whiz who helped build the now-ubiquitous Brightcove video players.

TINEYE

TinEye is reverse image search — feed it any image, either by uploading or by pasting the image URL, and it’ll tell you where it came from. We were able to use it on a scan of an obscure German calendar from our childhood and TinyEye proceeded to promptly produce a

TinEye can be particularly useful for identifying the artist or original source of photographs and artwork that you happen to stumble upon on Tumblr or another all-too-often unreferenced photo bookmarking service.

COOLIRIS

We first featured Cooliris nearly three years ago, when it was still called PicLens. This fantastic free browser plugin offers an image search interface like no other. It works on the expected image search platforms — Google, Flickr, etc. — but we particularly like its use on Facebook, where the native image browsing is lacking at best.

Cooliris is available for Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer. Unfortunately for us, Chrome for Mac — our browsing weapon combo of choice — is not supported yet, but is said to be coming soon.

RETRIEVR

Another blast from pickings past, retrievr is an experimental image search tool that uses color recognition to retrieve Flickr images that reflect the spatial color arrangement of a digital sketch you draw on a canvas.

It’s important to keep in mind that the algorithm doesn’t recognize shapes, but does color and space relationships — so if you doodle the outline of a martini glass in black, you’re more likely to get a lamp post, but if you go with an inverted triangle in blue, you may just get that Cosmo.

MULTICOLR SEARCH LAB

Easily the most useful color-based search tool yet, and also a throwback to our deep archives, Multicolr Search Lab offers a simple yet sophisticated way of finding images based on a color or color combination you’re looking for. Images are pulled from more than 10 million of Flickr’s most interesting photos and you can add up to 10 colors as your search criteria, including multiple swatches of the same color to indicate ratio — say you want an image that’s almost entirely yellow with a bit of blue, you may select yellow four times and blue once.

Developed by Toronto-based Idée Labs, the tool uses their proprietary Piximilar software which we’re utterly surprised Google hasn’t acquired yet.

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If you think augmented reality is a recent fascination woven from the fabric of the camera phone age, think again — artists, photographers and casual creative pranksters have long been using camera tricks to hack urban landscape by layering additional fascination over the naked eye’s view of the city. Here are three of our favorite photographic hackscapes.

SOUVENIRS

You recall Michael Hughes‘ wonderful Souvenirs collection from pickings past. The British photographer travels the world and “replaces” some of its most iconic landmarks with their cheap touristy souvenir replicas — miniatures, snow globes, plates, postcards — by holding them in front of the camera at just the right angle.

The result is a playful take on tourism which, depending on how philosophically inclined you are, even exudes subtle commentary on the artificiality of souvenir collecting in the context of the actual experience and our often excessive propensity for sentimentality.

Prints from the project are available on Hughes’ website.

LOOKING INTO THE PAST

Because we love the cross-pollination of ideas and the transference of creative inspiration, we love Jason Powell‘s Looking Into The Past project (which you may remember from one of our most popular features of all time, Photographic Time Machine), inspired by Hughes’ Souvenirs.

Powell prints out historical photographs from The Library of Congress digital archive (remember that, too?) and holds them up against the physical locations depicted in them, offering an absolutely fascinating glimpse of how urban landscape, dress and transportation have evolved over the past couple of centuries.

To contribute to this fold in the space-time continuum, submit your own photographic time capsules to the eponymous Flickr pool Powell set up for the project.

PENCIL VS. CAMERA

After object-in-photo and photo-in-photo, it’s only fitting that someone comes up with drawing-in-photo. Artist Benjamin Heine did — his series Pencil vs. Camera adds an element of playful fantasy to the already innovative cross-medium technique.

We imagine being trampled by cartoon Godzilla while staring at a four-eyed cat is among the eeriest yet most amusing of deaths.

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Crowdsourcing has clearly been the cultural darling of late. And while some of its most successful applications, from Wikipedia to reCAPTCHA, rely on “active crowdsourcing” — building the collective product by actively soliciting user input — others are starting to work wonders with “passive crowdsourcing,” using user-contributed content that is already available on the web.

Building Rome in a Day, a new project out of the University of Washington GRAIL lab, does just that, using 150,000 Flickr images tagged “Rome” to reconstruct the iconic city in 3D. Because tourist photos are taken from a multitude of vantage points, stitching them together into a cohesive 3D image creates rich and spatially accurate models.

The Rome project, which took 21 hours on a cluster of 496 computer cores, reconstructed some of the city’s most famous landmarks — the Colosseum, St. Peter’s Cathedral, Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon.

The team has also begun reconstructing other cities — Venice, which took 250,000 images and 65 hours, and Dubrovnik, at a more modest 57,845 photos and 22.5 hours.

The ongoing project has fascinating applications in reconstructing not only static landscapes, but also dynamic events as they unfold — in the era of citizen journalism, imagine using public images of anything from natural disasters (like the 2005 Indonesian tsunami) to political protests (like the recent unrest in Iran) to create an accurate record of history.

Or, you can always have a genius autistic savant fly over in a helicopter and draw frighteningly accurate panoramas on a 16-foot canvas.

via CT2

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Every once in a while we stumble across something we don’t quite get, but can tell is brilliant. Case in point: The Plan 9.001 Flickr set from an artist by the cryptic name of 9000.

Full of wondrous, beautifully art directed charts, graphs, diagrams and other fascinations that capture the human condition, the illustrations are part poetry, part art direction, part homage to geek culture — and all genius.

Most of the images are left to exist in their self-contained reality, with no caption or explanation, inviting you to make sense of them ever which way you wish.

And some are brimming with keen cultural commentary, oozing both from the images themselves and from the quotes accompanying — mismatched at first glance, like this odd psalm that we had to Google-translate, but deeply profound in context.

Indeed, there’s a certain preoccupation with the God — a quest for divinity in the godless, lonesome, conflicted world the artist seems to inhabit. Or, you know, it’s just a mockery thereof.

And while we’re not quite sure what to make of it it all, we urge you to explore the Plan 9.001 set and the rest of 9000′s rather diverse but uniformly bizarre body of work — if for no other reason than that it has intrigued us more than anything we’ve come across in a long, long time.

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You know we’re in dire straits when Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web, says we no longer fully understand the Internet.

But Wired magazine founder and chronic digital culture explorer Kevin Kelly has set out to dissect the fabric of the web. His Internet Mapping Project is an effort to understand how people conceive of the Internet through a series of user-submitted hand-drawn maps.

The internet is intangible, like spirits and angels. The web is an immense ghost land of disembodied places. Who knows if you are even there, there. Yet everyday we navigate through this ethereal realm for hours on end and return alive. We must have some map in our head.

So far, there are close to 80 submissions by people of all ages, nationalities and expertise levels, ranging from the concrete to the conceptual to the comic.

The project has also sprouted further analysis of people’s understanding – Argentinean psychology professor Mara Vanina Oses has distilled a fascinating taxonomy of the maps themselves.

Our favorite submission is a visceral stride-stopper that manages to communicate the nature of the Internet with brilliant simplicity, capturing the sea of interestingness that surrounds our homebase of curiosity.

Each submission asks for the person’s age, occupation and average daily hours on the web. And while the diversity of entries is astounding — from an art student to a jazz musician moonlighting as an IT consultant to the manager of the 10,000 Year Clock project — we did notice some interesting correlations.

Those who spend the most time online, for instance, have the most abstract of drawings — perhaps an indication that a truly rich understanding lives in the realm of the abstract and conceptual, not the concrete, providing a big-picture view not of what the Internet does or offers, but of what it is: An infinite loop of possibility.

At the same time, those who spend the least amount of time tend to put themselves at the center of the Internet — a sign of the “developmental psychology” of the web, wherein “web toddlers,” just like real 1-4-year-olds, adopt an egocentric worldview, while “web adults” are better able to shift perspectives and see the collective context of it all.

Download, sketch, and submit your map today.

HT LoloBloggs

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“Everything’s been done.”

Or so goes the adage drilled into every budding art director from the start. Now, we have proof, thanks to Similarities — a Flickr set that pits pairs of similar images against each other, exposing their striking aesthetic and conceptual similarity.

Substantiating Einstein’s bold contention that “the secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources,” Similarities takes pairs of cultural artifacts, often separated by decades, and exposes anything from well-meaning homages to blatant rip-offs to the unfortunate overlaps of equally twisted minds.

The thing to keep in mind, though, is that Similarities isn’t out to point the finger at the potential (and often clear) theft of ideas — rather, it’s there to shed light on the creative process, to illustrate something we very much believe here at Brain Pickings: That creativity is simply the sum total of your mental resources, the catalog of ideas you’ve accumulated over the years by being alive and alert and attentive to the outside world.

So when you explore Similarities, challenge yourself to question the subconscious influences and stealthy inspiration that creep into your own creative output. What you find may surprise you.

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Most people hate those dreadful red-eye flights. But the true sign of a creative mind is the ability to take suckiness and twist it into brilliance. Case in point: Amsterdam-based architect James Leng, a.k.a. Ettubrute.

On a recent overnight flight from Amsterdam to San Francisco, James noticed that the lights from the cities the plane was flying over were making the clouds glow with a soft, ethereal light. So he got the rather brilliant idea of propping a camera on an empty window seat, setting it at ISO 1600, and playing with a range of exposures over the 3 hours between the Rockies and San Fran.

The end result was this stunning, hypnotizing time-lapse video, on which every light squiggle and flicker is an actual town or city the plane flew over.

Here’s to the demise of the airline industry, which makes half-empty flights the playground of creative minds.

via BoingBoing

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Typically, Photoshop design is, in one way or another, a mock-up of visuals that could, or do, exist in the real world. But Jakarta-based agency Bates 141 decided to flip this on its head in a project for client software-asil.com.

In an design-imitates-life-imitates-design twist, the crew literally brought the Photoshop CS4 workspace to life.

We have to appreciate both the strategic freshness and the supreme craftsmanship behind the work — we can’t help wanting to come in and play with the wonderful world of tools and colors.

You can see the behind-the-scenes details of the extremely laborious process at Art Snob Solutions’ corner of Flickr.

via Scary Ideas

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The recent Pepsi redesign produced a new logo, fresh packaging and a slew of mixed response across the social web spanning the entire it-sucks-it-rocks spectrum — not quite the all-around applause last year’s award-winning new Coke identity got, but still an interesting conversation to follow.

The evolution of the logo alone sparked a heated discussion in the design community.

A multi-talented artist friend of ours loved the very first one best, declaring: “It looks like Tim Burton did it.” Which of course gives anything more street cred than any advertising can buy. And the guys at Make The Logo Bigger just launched a Design Your Own Pepsi Logo contest on Flickr for all the naysayers and smart-asses who think they know better than Pepsi’s $1 million design team.

Meanwhile, the ever-eager Steve Rubel of Edelman, Pepsi’s PR firm, got to spreading the word ever which way he could. First, influential social media types got a kit of 10 Pepsi cans showing the evolution of the logo, complete with a teaser note.

Then, a YouTube video popped up tracing Pepsi’s design history. And despite the questionable editing and the cheesy music choice, we found it somewhat endearing.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOL8MBN8-IQ

Rubel even set up a room on FriendFeed called the The Pepsi Cooler where Pepsi is inviting ordinary web users to help shape the company’s media future. An admirable, albeit misguided initiative as it seems that so far, the bulk of room members are professional social media all-stars. Heck, Chris Brogan is on there.

Also from the well-intentioned but misguided front: We came across this cool tag cloud in the FriendFeed room, showing responses to the redesign. No love link and thus no clue where it came from, just a random image hosted on the Amazon cloud server — but pretty neat nonetheless.

It may be smart of Edelman/Pepsi to actually stand behind the Flickr contest and hear what the design community has to say in the only language it speaks. After all, they put themselves on the social media table, so now it’s all fair game. And, sure, it could turn into a food fight — but they’d better be ready to join in and play.

But enough about our take. What’s your 2 cents on Pepsi’s $1 million redesign initiative?

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We love Mad Men. We also love illustration. And we’re obsessed with Flickr.

So, naturally, we’re all over the Mad Men Illustrated series by NYC-based freelance illustrator, designer and comedian Dyna Moe.

If her style seems familiar, it’s because Dyna Moe’s credentials include posters and other work for cult comedy outfit Upright Citizens Brigade, for whom she’s been the “unofficial official house designer” since 1999, plus a ton of album artwork for various indie labels.

The illustration look and style are inspired by the work of commercial artwork legends from the Mad Men era, including Aurelius Battaglia, Alice & Martin Provensen, and J. P. Miller. The collection started with a holiday card capturing the Mad Men Christmas party from last season, after which Dyna Moe, um, didn’t stop. Right now, all of the images are available as desktop wallpaper downloads, with the most popular up for sale as custom prints at Zazzle.com.

We, for one, are all the more inspired by the far-reaching resonance of this show, which has revolutionized the scripted drama television genre, rekindled some of history’s most taboo controversies, spurred intense debates on consumer culture, been credited with skewing retail fashion, and now inspired an art following.

We bet it can even do our laundry.

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