One of the best ways to collect your thoughts when conceptualizing is to create a mood board. It's an obvious, visual reminder of the aesthetic you hope to capture for your next creative project.

That said, creating a mood board can be quite time-consuming... especially if you're a bit of a perfectionist. Sometimes, it can take ages to find the right images. Thankfully, you now have a better alternative to going on a prolonged Pinterest or Google Images search.

Search for Images by Mood

Toronto-based developer Jacob Jackson is the creator of Same Energy, an image search engine that gives you results based not on keywords—but on moods, styles, and themes. Simply type a word/phrase or paste an image into the search bar at the top, and watch the deep learning AI get to work.

Same Energy was created to to help you discover new styles that you might want to use as inspiration, which is why it's perfect for making mood boards. The best part is that the search still works even without tags or metadata. An image is all the engine really needs.

Jackson said:

We [at Same Energy] believe that image search should be visual, using only a minimum of words. And we believe it should integrate a rich visual understanding, capturing the artistic style and overall mood of an image, not just the objects in it.

Using Same Energy is completely free, and you're not required to create an account to use the search engine. But signing up does grants you a little bit more functionality, namely the ability to save images and sort them into groups called Collections.

You can sign up with your email or with just a username, but if you choose the latter, there's no way to recover your account should you forget your password.

It would appear that Same Energy first began as a text search tool. In September 2020, Jackson wrote a blog post promoting Same Energy, which allowed you to search for articles, posts, and tweets by similarity in writing style. It's still up today, but the original "same.energy" URL is now home to its image search counterpart.

Same Energy: A Creative's Dream Search Engine

At the time of writing, Same Energy is still in beta, but it seems to already accomplish its goal of finding images that have... well, the same energy. The tool's clearly appropriately named.

When visiting Same Energy for the first time, you're greeted with a popup that says the engine "will likely see many changes in the near future." If you have any comments or suggestions, just hit the Give feedback button at the top of the page.