- MulticolorEngine Lab: Get my color – or color extraction
MulticolorEngine, the API powering our color search lab is now available for licensing. You have probably already played with our color search lab and already experienced addictive color searching but if you haven’t give it a whirl today.
This API can be integrated with any image search collection to allow users to search by colors. Well suited for e-commerce and image centric website and requiring no technology infrastructure changes, this API’s features include: the ability to index images by color, search by color as well as extract colors from a single image or a series of images – amongst many other features.
Today we would like to feature MulticolorEngine’s color extraction feature. To showcase this feature, we created a lab that allows users to extract colors from their images in real time. Drop by the lab, play with the feature and let us know what you think; we would love your feedback (link to contact form).
Using this MulticolorEngine lab you can:
- upload an image
- drag and drop an image
- or provide a URL to view the colors contained in your image.
MulticolorEngine will display a color palette for all the colors identified in your image. Color extraction works for JPEGs, PNGs and GIFs. Colors are displayed in RGB or HEX values.
and since this week is shark week:
And make sure to click on the colors on the generated color palette for a surprise multicolor search!
Shark photograph (c) by IVES.one
- Color search to make you smile!
It has been a busy few months in the TinEye HQ!
Our TinEye APIs are finally out of the oven and ready to take for a spin – we will talk about these another time – as today I would like to tell you about one API: MulticolorEngine. This is one of our favorite APIs and once you have played with it, you will join our fans!
Of course we are biased but we believe that MulticolorEngine is very likely the best color search engine in the world :)
Some of you may remember that a while ago we released a color search lab. It was our playground to use our color search technologies and figure out all the kinks of a color search API before we introduce it to the world. We basically sat down and ate our own dog food to wrap up development of our color search API. This new color search lab is powered by our new MuticolorEngine API. And you will get a pretty good feel for what this API by visiting and playing with the new lab.
The color search lab searches a 10 million creative commons image collection from Flickr. Of course you could integrate the MulticolorEngine API with any image collection and search it by one or more colors.
Now let’s step you through searching by color in our lab.
Let’s start by picking a single color. Summer green! (we made the color name up by the way!):
Nice color right?But what if you felt like a little orange? in addition to the green?
And how about some yellow to enhance that summer green and orange?
Neat? But what if you wanted less green and more orange? Well you would simply need to move up the color dividers and presto!
See how our color distribution changed:
From:
To:
There are a few ways to alter the color combinations you have selected: by using the slider and just changing the percentage of color in each color selection or by simply adding more of a single color. If for example you had a green and orange combination and you wanted to see what would happen if you added more of the same orange: all you would have to do is add more orange and continue until the desired results start showing up.
Continue adding colors to your selection and MulticolorEngine will continue fetching the images that contain your color selection.
But suppose you no longer love your orange color selection?
Just click on the trash can and it is gone.
But now let’s say you don’t like the current shade of red you have selected. We have a solution for that as well – we know how attached people are to very specific colors! Click on the color wheel icon to bring up a full color wheel and select your desired color.
Change the red and get a new set of results:
As with any new release, there are still lots of enhancements and features we would like to add and we would appreciate your feedback.
Got a few minutes, well, play! and let us know what you think before we get to polishing this release.And oh, one last thing: we have heard that sometimes you have a color code and would like to search for exactly that color, without going through an interface. Well you can do that via the page’s URL:
Notice the above highlighted code? That’s a hex color code and you can alter it to whatever hex RGB code you like!
MulticolorEngine: hand crafted in Toronto (Canada) by the TinEye team and a lot of caffeine (and sometimes beer).
- PsychicSearch
Soon you too will be able to search for images without a keyboard. From your brain to the screen and badaboom results! Why did we not think about Psychic Search – from the good folks at Alamy. And here we are slaving away at improving image recognition!
- Copyright Reform: yes, let’s go!
Copyright Reform
I am looking forward to seeing some of the copyright reform recommendations rolled out soon. If like me, you have tried to use the search functions to find copyright information for a photograph or any works, you know what I mean. You – like most of the Copyright Office users probably still have forehead bruises resulting from your head hitting a nearby concrete wall (or handy hard surface).
On all seriousness: it is about time to bring the Copyright Office forward. So if you are in Washington, join us for an afternoon conference: Toward a Copyright Office for the 21st Century, a Public Knowledge Conference discussing the future of the Copyright Office. This conference will build off of the ideas put forth in Public Knowledge’s recent whitepaper, “A Copyright Office for the 21st Century: Recommendations to the New Register of Copyrights”.
This is incredibly timely as the Librarian of Congress will be appointing the first new Register of Copyright since 1994. The new Register will be the first appointed in the Internet era, and will have an opportunity to shape the Copyright Office for the 21st Century.
I am excited to be joining the conversation and participating in a panel presentation this afternoon along side:
- Tracey Armstrong, President and CEO, Copyright Clearance Center
- James Cavanaugh, National Director and Treasurer, American Society of Media Photographers
- Jule Sigall, Associate General Counsel – Copyright, Microsoft
- Respondent: Maria Pallante, Acting Register of Copyrights
- Moderator: Michael Weinberg, Public Knowledge
With the advances made in image search and image recognition based search, perhaps the next Copyright Office Database is simply the web!
- TinEye Image Analytics
At the TinEye headquarters we are constantly thinking about image search features for our reverse image search engine and of course how to make TinEye the best reverse image search engine in the world. We like building useful software for our fans.
So listening to you all sending in feature requests, ideas, suggestions etc. one feature constantly makes it to the top of the request list (after a larger index) and that is what our fans call an image alert. This basically would be a service that would allow TinEye users to find out of where their images are appearing on the web via an automated notification mechanism. Similar to Google Alerts but for images.
So today I would like you to tell us what comes to mind when you (our TinEye fan) think about when you think about image alerts and how would such a feature make your image searches easier.We have heard that as a professional and amateur photographer you would like to find out where your images are appearing and figure out if they are being used according to how they were licensed. But surely you would probably want to use an image alert service for more than just a copyright tracking tool! At least we think so because we believe analytics to be an incredible tool to drive your decision making (why fly blindingly to your destination, when you can get a compass to direct you?).
How we envision an image analytics service is simple (in principle): you would upload a set of images to the service and get a notification each time your image is spotted on the wild web. But as we are gathering data for this service we can’t help but think about what other features could make you love TinEye even more. We have a number of ideas but we would love to hear from you all. So drop us a line in the comments and tell us about your dream features for an image analytics service.
We are listening. And would like to engage in a conversation with you all.
- The TinEye Chrome extension is here!
You asked for it, and we are happy to deliver. The TinEye extension for Chrome is now live, and ready to make your searching a little easier.
Instructions for installing the extension can be found on our plugins page, or you can just jump right over to the Chrome Extensions site and click ‘Install’. It’s that easy! While you’re there, be sure to check out our how-to video on YouTube (or watch it below).
This extension works for Windows and Linux. Once Chrome supports it, a Mac version will be coming soon. Also, Chrome currently does not support right-clicking so the present extension behaves similar to our TinEye bookmarklet (but much nicer!). We’ll be updating the functionality once right-clicking is made available.
Enjoy!
- TinEye now accepting image collection submissions
TinEye has just one goal in life: To connect images and information. Whether that means finding the original author of an image, finding out where an image has been used on the web, or finding out more information about an image in general, TinEye wants to help you find the information you’re looking for. And the bigger our database of images, the better!
We have been crawling the web relentlessly over the past several months. In October ’09 we grew by 21.5 million images. In November we grew by 22.5 million images. In December we leaped up another 65 million images. And in January alone we’ve added 44 million images and the month is not over yet!
In addition to our regular web crawling, we have started adding entire specialized image collections. Last week we announced the addition of the iStockphoto and Photoshelter stock photo collections to TinEye. Why? Because we want to make it easy to attribute any stock image to its original author, and facilitate sales. And we plan to add new and different specialized image collections over the coming weeks and months. Maybe even yours?
So… calling all companies dealing with large image collections on the web! TinEye is officially accepting your image collection submissions. Here are some of the things we are looking for:
- Stock and editorial photography collections
- Art and illustration collections
- Product image indexes and catalogs
- Archival or historical image collections
- You tell us!
If you are an image provider or deal with large image collections as a part of your business–and if you want more people connecting with your images–then we want to hear from you! Preference will be given to collections containing over 1 million images, and to companies with an existing image management and delivery procedure.
To add your image collection to TinEye, please contact us. Help us connect your images to you!
- Who created that image? TinEye adds the iStockphoto and Photoshelter collections.
We are happy to announce that TinEye our reverse image search engine has grown its index again adding over 32 million images including the entire iStockphoto and Photoshelter image collections. This is great news for photographers, image buyers and anyone interested in copyright compliance and attribution.
Today the TinEye index sits at just over 1.2 billion images – yes, that’s billion not million – 1,267,565,027 to be exact. As we grow we have been looking at how to answer just one question:
- who created that image?
Why is this important? Simple: Attribution. Creators want to establish authorship of their work and also know where their images are used. TinEye facilitates both.
As TinEye’s index grew, TinEye became the defacto image registry. Every day TinEye answers the “who created that image” question and connects images to their source. TinEye does this without keywords or metadata. Simply use an image to find an image. This is what we like to call the beginning of the attribution movement.
To start we are adding the world’s stock photography images to TinEye to connect all images available for licensing to their creator and distributor. And that’s just the beginning.
Every day TinEye helps image authors by:
- linking images to the original author – this is about attribution
- allowing image buyers to find the proper distributor of an image to purchase it
- showing how and where images are being used on the web
- protecting against image theft
Maybe you are a designer and you’d like to purchase an image for a project and you have a thumbnail or comp image but you’re not sure where it came from. Maybe you’re in love with a certain awesome image and would like to see the author’s other work. Maybe you want to see who else on the web is using an image… maybe you’re the image author. It does not matter: TinEye connects the dots for you.
At TinEye, we want to index every image in the world to help you find what you are looking for. iStockphoto and Photoshelter are a pretty awesome step towards that but it does not stop there. We will be adding a series of stock photography collections in the coming weeks so please stay tuned. If you are interested in having your image collection added to TinEye, get in touch.
Start using TinEye or join the 500,000 people who dowloaded our TinEye Firefox add-on to make image searching a single click.
- TinEye Firefox Plugin = Awesomesauce
What you make is important
We thought enabling you to search for an image using an images was the apogée of search. The nec plus ultra, the ultimate … well you get my drift. Using TinEye you still had to upload an image or feed TinEye a URL. For those of you still unfamiliar with TinEye (how is that possible?):
TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. For some real TinEye search examples, check out our Cool Searches page.
So to make life even easier for you, we created a series of TinEye plugins. And it looks like you guys just totally love our TinEye Firefox plugin: we surpassed 250,000 downloads, and that’s only since we started counting! My team tells me that we are way way beyond that. But hey, we are sticking to the public numbers! And as of this post they are actually getting closer to 300,000 downloads!
And boy this also makes us a top download!
Thanks for spreading the word about the TinEye Firefox plugin. Help us reach the ONE MILLION download! That’s a milestone we are going to celebrate in the ideeplex! Thanks for helping out get the word out:
and everyone who keeps tweeting about TinEye.
- TinEye on CNN
TinEye, our reverse image search engine, ended up on CNN with Kyra Phillips. Lucky TinEye!
During this segment, CNN’s Kyra Phillips talks to virtual safety expert Christine Durst about protecting your family photos online. Have a listen:
Surprising what TinEye can unearth, like say an older photograph of Kyra Phillips being used on a Latin American online clinic website!
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