- Search Flickr Creative Commons by colour
Our multicolr lab is certainly a Flickr + Crayloa baby. Go play here. Don’t say I did not warn you: you will spend many colorful hours forgetting about all the work on your plate this Monday!
Thanks @AnneLikesRed, @carolynsewell and @katieobriendc
- Fantasticism
That’s a word I have never used!
Fantasticism Fan*tas”ti*cism\, n. The quality of being fantastical; fancifulness; whimsicality.
Well, that’s how Garrett describes our Multicolr Lab!
- Multicolr Fun
Every once in a while we get an email from someone who has played with our lab technologies and built something fun and exciting. Last month I received an email from my good friend Patrick and since then it has been sitting in my inbox begging for attention! I am such a delinquent when it comes to emails! But that said: Patrick has an awesome career: he spends his time building exciting project, exploring how technology can enhance people’s lives and experiences. You may have seen some of his projects around Toronto. Just recently he built the TXTris wall version 2 which was showcased during HoHoTo on Monday. It was awesome, and I know a few of us spent time sending Tweets just to see them scroll down the screens (some the tweets were not fit to print so we won’t be repeating those here!).
Patrick was inspired by our Multicolr search to build a little prototype: this prototype basically takes a stream from a webcam and picks out the dominant colours and passes them through our Multicolr Search to find photographs that match those colours. Very, very neat and you can view it here:
Colrfindr from Patrick Dinnen on Vimeo.
- Stunning Multicolr search from the good folks at idée
Oh that’s us! Well yes of course the Multicolr search is stunning but we love it when you say it specially on BoingBoing.
Thank you. Thank you. Now back to work!
- We exist to bring you happiness!
Thank you Garrett!
- Multicolr lab
Yesterday was October 23 and that was Smurf anniversary! And I missed it. I had all the intentions in the world of doing blue searches on the Multicolr lab but you know bizness got in the way! If you are not familiar with the Smurfs, hurry up and read up (thank you wikipedia). For me, growing up, the Smurfs were Les Schtroumpfs. Their stories were bold adventures and they made Spirou my favourite magazine! Now in honour of Peyo and his Schtroumpfs, I gave you blue multicolr searches! If you want to try these yourself head over to the Multicolr lab and have fun. Happy belated Schroumpf day!
- Search Flickr for Multicolrful Images
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
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.
- Idée’s multicolour lab in Brazil!
I had a great conversation a few weeks ago with Daniela who is a journalist for the Folha de Sao Paulo in Brazil. Daniela writes about technology and design and our colour search lab made a great impression on her. As it should! As most of you know we develop visual search technologies: image search technologies that allow you to find similar images in extremely large image collections. This is all done by developing algorithms that analyze the visual attributes of an image (such as shape, colour, composition) and then comparing an image to other images and matching their overall similarities. You can play with that in our visual search lab. When we introduced visual search, a lot of clients, users and people who work with images told us repeatedly that what they would like to see more than visual search perhaps is a good colour search. Now, of course there are a number of colour search products out there but we think our approach is tops. I have a longer post in the plans to explain how our approaches differ from others.
Colour search transcends cultures and languages. We all have colour preferences and describing them in terms of keywords is non-intuitive and certainly very limiting. I like many shades of blue and orange and when searching I would like to express that and be able to see images that are exactly within those requirements. I am personally a big fan of colour search as it is an intuitive way to discover new images and photographs.
In our future plans: a creative commons multi colour search implementation. This will allow our fans to search large creative commons libraries using multi colour to discover new visual works.
- Colour Search and Colour Love
COLOURlovers is a nifty site where you can check out a world of colour, compare colour palettes, submit news and comments, and read colour related articles and interviews.
We were happy to hear that the nice folks at COLOURlovers have much love for the Idée Labs.
Idée Labs is Idée’s technology playground for visual search and image recognition. You can experiment and play with various implementations of Idée’s visual search technologies.
With Multicolour Search (Alamy and Flickr sets), Visual Search and BYO Image Search there are plenty of ways to work with colour and search millions of images in the Labs.
Says COLOURlovers member Shweta “This is amazing…we can get inspiration for theme board, texture boards — I have gone crazy” and dbme says “Those are some fantastic tools.”
We’re glad you are all enjoying our labs, stay tuned for more fun to be released soon!
- Colr.org Palettes for Multicolour Search Lab
If you’re a colr.org user you may have noticed that the community-created colour palettes link directly to a corresponding colour search on our Multicolour Search Lab (Alamy Set). Whether it be modern teal or gentian blues, colr.org has got you covered.
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