Our Multicolr Search Lab is the first tool on the web that enables searching by colour through 10 million creative commons images from Flickr.

Idée’s Piximilar is the technology behind the Multicolr Search Lab. While most colour search tools can only identify the dominant colour in an image, our technology allows you to choose up to 10 colours from a palette of 120 different shades (thought it can handle any colour palette imaginable).

Cameron Parkins from creativecommons.org says our Multicolr Search “is a ton of fun and a great way to find some really beautiful CC-licensed images” and Website magazine calls it “a must for bloggers, or anyone else who wants to get photos with a specific color scheme.”

Here’s an example search by blogger Aditi that returns images of spring and summer:

You can adjust your search results by adding more of certain colours and less of others to feature your favourite colours more prominently in the images returned. Abhijeet shared our colour search tool with the readers over at makeuseof.com and demonstrated how you can dynamically search with just a few clicks.

From a selection of orange-based images…

…to the ‘pop’ and interest of oranges, greens and browns.

As you pick and choose your colours the search results automatically refresh with images that represent your new colour selections. When you click on any image it directs you to that photo on Flickr so you can learn more.

Looking for images of buildings? Try a grey-blue search combo, pulling in the colours of stone and sky.

Bryan Lee who blogs on OriginalProgram.Intermissions has a really great example of Multicolr in action with his black and purple search, below.  His thoughts? “Here’s a great resource for finding color coordinated photos through Flickr. Whether you are designing and need it for storyboards, or simply want to mess around on the web, this makes for a great little web app.”

Here’s another search idea. Using bright colours and plenty of white I created a “comic book and cartoon characters” inspired search:

The combinations are endless.

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