Flickr is my favorite online source of images: it stores an incredible number of creative and unique photos you can use for inspiration.
Flickr advanced search allows for multiple search options: you can choose to search by tags or full text, media type (photos or videos or both); date, creative commons, etc.
The choice is really great but somehow using the built-in search platform is by far less exciting than taking advantage of numerous external tools that search Flickr creatively.
Flickr Color Selectr allows you to set color preferences by color picker or color properties.
Image search is evolving quickly. Today you don’t even need to use words to search images. Now you can use colors!. That’s right you can search images by color.
Let’s search the web for an autumn-like palette (yellow, red, brown) using the following 3 services. Let’s see how the search results are like.
PicItUp is a visual image search engine that combines word-based with color based search.
Test it: search for [autumn] and choose any color from the left column (I chose yellow). Now let’s look at the results:
Impressive, isn’t it?
TinEye is an image search engine by Idée that lets you find where a particular image has been used on the web.
You are probably saying, “Oh, but there is Google image search for me. Why would I need another one?”. But TinEye is an entirely different kind of image search. While Google image search uses text to search for associated images, TinEye uses an image as a query for searching. Google can’t do that - at least, not yet.
If you’re in a hurry, here’s a quick video explanation from Idée on how TinEye works. Or read on for my explanation.
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