A Bright Idée

So if you follow this blog you will know I discovered twitter a little while back (you know, like how Columbus discovered America). On it, I follow a couple artists and media people I admire and/or deeply respect, one of those being Jay Smooth. His tweets are all over the place at times but he has dropped some gems, one of my favorites being the Idée Lab.



Idée is a company that develops image ID software and visual search software. In a basic sense, it is the google of images. You upload an image and it will locate that image all over the internet and tell you where it is. This can be used recreationally by different users or it can be used by companies to find where their images are being used around the web as well as in print publications.

So while Idée has these advanced programs for image recognition, they have a couple of interesting projects in their lab.

Multicolr allows you to choose up to 10 colors and they will search all of flickr for photos containing the chosen colors (this is how I came to the image above)

Visual Search Lab allows you to type in a variety of tags and it will search Alamy for all photos containing those tags.

BYO Image Search will find images on Alamy that match an image you give it (uploaded or provide a link to). I found this one interesting because I gave it a picture of a cyclist that had very distinct lighting and it not only found photos of bikes, but it also found photos with the lighting that I had used on it, pretty cool!

So now you can search with words, music, and now photos, I can only imagine what's next, search by scent? It's really not all THAT crazy of an idea is it?