7 Image Search Tools That Will Change Your Life

What martinis have to do with reverse art lookup and obscure German calendars from the 1990’s.

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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Urban Hackscapes: Augmented Reality 1.0

iPhone vs. pencil, or what the Library of Congress has to do with cartoon dinosaurs.

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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Building Rome in a Day: Crowdsourced 3D Cities

Reconstructing Rome, or what 496 computer cores and an autistic savant have in common.

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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Illustration Spotlight: Plan 9.001

The 1’s and 0’s of home, or what the Olsen twins have to do with John Locke and God.

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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