- Eastman House Images Join Flickr’s “The Commons”
Delightful! The folks over at Flickr just announced that the George Eastman House has joined The Commons with three initial sets of images including the Chusseau-Flaviens collection, Southworth & Hawes and Autochromes.
George Eastman House is the oldest photography museum in the world, housed in the former home of Mr. George Eastman, the so-called father of modern photography and founder of Eastman Kodak company. The Museum is also one of the premiere centres of photographic conservation in the world.
The Chusseau-Flaviens collection depicts “social and political figures and events throughout Europe and the colonial empires in the Near East and the Far East” from the 1890s to just before World War I.
Messrs. Southworth & Hawes were partners in commercial studio in Boston, primarily shooting daguerreotype portraits. The studio opened in 1843, and closed twenty years later.
Auguste and Louis Lumière’s 1904 invention of the autochrome process produced the lovely images in the third gallery, Autochromes.
Can you imagine?
Auguste to Lumière: “Let’s dust some tiny potato starch grains dyed orange-red, green and violet onto a glass plate and then cover them with a layer of panchromatic silver bromide emulsion.”
Lumière: “Oh, that’s brilliant!”
- Taking the lead in visual search
Idée and TinEye get a nod from Tom Keenan in ‘Cloud computing a down-to-earth solution’ from last month’s Business Edge. Keenan says “Idée is definitely in the visual search-engine lead.” Yes we are!
- Getting The Big Picture
If you’re not acquainted with “The Big Picture” from the Boston Globe, I highly recommend you stop by and say hello. Plan to stay a while, the images are stunning, the stories compelling.
Alan Taylor posts these amazing California wildfire images (and many more) in large format (which makes all the difference, trust me).
While you are there, check out these amazing Tour de France shots and beating the heat around the world. (I love the shot of Anthony Chance landing in the pool, great form!)
- Search Engines for Librarians (and the rest of us)
Laura Milligan’s list of 50 Awesome Search Engines Every Librarian Should Know About is a handy resource, and not just for librarians.
Nicely organized into sub-groups such as Meta Search and Multi Search, Multimedia and Interactive, Great Niche Sites for Librarians, Custom/Reference searches and more, the post introduced me to many sites I’d never heard of.
Scirus for scientific information, GuideStar to help you find information about non-profits and Public Radio Fan for radio stations from around the world are just a few of the 50 on the list.
- Snazzy New TinEye Widgets
With all the requests for new widgets, how could we say no? As we don’t have an easy way for our fans to create their own widgets using TinEye, we decided to do that for them.
Today we are rolling out a shiny new set, six new ones to go along with Mona, Tux and George. We picked the most requested images from all our fans to create our latest “TinEye flow” widgets.
Embeddable at two sizes, our hero from the 300 movie, Hello Kitty and more join the original Mona Lisa in the widget gallery.
Creating them has been an interesting process. A successful widget requires a nifty query image (one that’s popular and often photoshopped), hundreds (if not thousands) of TinEye search results and interesting and creative edits from all over the web.
And these aren’t all. Check out the widget gallery on the TinEye site for more of our new widgets.
Need an invitation to our image search engine beta? You can request one, it’s quick and easy.
Did we miss an image that you think would be a great widget? Let us know.
- Image tracking
And because we are in the business of tracking where images appear for our clients, this “shooting Britney” article from The Atlantic is a great read!
The evolution of Hollywood paparazzi from a marginal nuisance to one of the most powerful and lucrative forces driving the American news-gathering industry is a phenomenon that dates back to March 2002, when a women’s magazine editor named Bonnie Fuller took over a Wenner Media property called Us Weekly, which had drifted along since its founding in 1977 as a rival to the fantastically successful People magazine franchise. What Fuller brought to Us was a keen understanding of her audience. “Every day, we’d look at tons of pictures that came in and lay them all out on a conference table,” Fuller remembers. “And what was interesting to me was to look at celebrities going to the dry cleaners and pumping gas. I loved looking at these pictures of celebrities who were just like us.”
- Conversations still matter
We have been doing a lot of that in the last little while to get feedback for some of products and services. When we launched TinEye we made sure that we were accessible and responsive to our users, fans and simply folks who had questions about it. That meant a lot of conversations, a lot emails and a lot of presentations. That’s worked out really well because we managed to distill important features from casual conversations and in depth investigations. What brought a smile to my morning blogging is to find out that Steve Kilisky is involved in pretty much the same process at his end (Adobe). Not that this is rocket science, but he points out an important thing we learned ourselves over the years: surveys are not the right way to gather data, conversations are. Conversations still matter. It seems like a really small point to make, but it is not.
Conversations will change your product. Start them. I have in the works a blog post about TinEye’s most requested features, ideas our fans have brought forward and concepts to explore. We will also be creating a forum for TinEye as we would like to continue capturing our conversations and involving our fans.
- TinEye Around the World
Thank goodness for translation software as TinEye has been traveling the world. So what’s the latest?
I have only a vague (google translated) idea of what Robert Kneschke is saying here but I do know he’s a fan and that he writes lovely things about us in German. Vielen Dank Robert!
The fantastic folks over at StartupMeme have an Eye for TinEye.
Kaly from makeuseof.com also reviewed TinEye on their site.
TinEye. Let the games begin is from our neck of the world since Dan is a Canadian Photographer. heh!
In Russia, Alexander at Kavelin.net reviewed TinEye and put our image search engine through its paces. With edits and blurs, TinEye still found the original query image – a screenshot from the movie Forest Gump – and that was before we added almost 200,000,000 more images to the index.
What’s exciting is that even if it’s a bit tricky to understand what’s being said, images require no translation.
We also heard from Many over at n.e.r.d.logger.com who just discovered TinEye and says “their algorithms run circles around pretty much every other technology in this field.”
And last one: and this one is a scenario that we have been discussing in the Ideeplex: how can you figure out if the photo that someone is using on their dating site profile is really their photograph? Ming-Tsung discovered that TinEye was handy for exactly that.
- Meanwhile, somewhere in the East… a TinEye story
Scott Liddell scored a TinEye beta invitation yesterday and I have to say, he has some lovely finds. Using TinEye, Scott searched for his images in our index of over 700 million images and came up with some surprising results!
Scott shares on his blog:
And someone at HP seems to really like my fruit because it seems to
be in quite a few places. So do Channel 4, in the guise of that odious jobbie woman. Star fruit, who knew.I think I might end up playing with TinEye for hours.
One of the nifty finds was his bird photo photoshopped into an awesome looking cat-bird by the folks at HumanDescent. TinEye wasn’t fooled though.
Nice searches Scott, thanks for sharing your TinEye story.
* Images Scott Liddell
- Help me search
Alex at ReadWriteWeb has a great post about the future of computer applications where he explains that:
Software is increasingly polarized into utilities and entertainment. Utilities help us work and are becoming more rigorous. We’re looking for helpful software that understands our context and guides us through the process, whether it is search or a complex business task.
I believe that “Search is the most important utility on the web” and that the new search technologies that are seeing the light of day are going to change how we work (but hey I am biased!) but what’s even more important to mention is the fact that these search applications are becoming more aware of the context of search and will provide us with more guidance. We want to find the answers without having to wade through piles of results.
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