- 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).
- Photography lovers unite!
At the TinEye HQ we love Photoshelter’s CEO photography rant, we love it so much that we want everyone to read it, share it, print it on a giant poster and display it on Time Square. Seriously. Best photo rant ever!
Don’t we all love photography? The answer is no. There is a percentage of photographers who hate photography. They do not appreciate photography. They do not consume photography. They don’t look at photo books or photo magazines. They hate the guy with the iPhone taking Instagram shots. They hate the guy who just bought the D4 because they don’t have one. They hate people using digital because film is what real artists use. They hate photographers who embrace social media because images should stand on their own. They hate Getty, Corbis, the AP, day rates, photo editors, assistants, rental houses, camera stores, point-and-shoots, iPads, zoom lenses, padded camera straps, wheeled suitcases, younger photographers, older photographers. The photo of so-and-so on the cover of whatever it’s called sucks. That guy copied the other guy, he sucks. Terry Richardson sucks. Chuck Close sucks. Vincent Laforet hasn’t taken a still in 17 years. Kodak hasn’t been managed well since the 70s. Blah, blah, blah.
Allen Murabayashi shows you how and why to love photography. For real.
- How genius works.
In this video filmed by Ross McDermott, Sam Abell recounts his year-long quest to find the perfect image of bison skulls. Sometimes great things take a (very) long time!
- Picture This! by Arte
The Franco-German TV channel Arte has launched a new project called Picture This!
This is an awesome series of interviews with photographers. The photographers interviewed answer a series of 10 questions with images rather than words. Very up our alley and superbly creative. Our favourites include:
Slava Mogutin and Oliver Görnandt.Go ahead and try answering the 10 questions with your photographs.
- The Threadless Photo Department: Sean Dorgan
Our great friends over at Photoshelter released a little video about their visit to the Threadless Photo Department in Chicago. Threadless is a community-based t-shirt design company in Chicago. I am sure you are familiar with their awesome geek t-shirt designs. Listen as Grover from Photoshelter interviews Sean Dorgan a self-taught photographer who has been the Threadless in house photographer for 3 years now.
Inside the Threadless Photo Department from PhotoShelter.com on Vimeo.
- 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.
- 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 makes the headlines (again!)
Yesterday the National Post poked fun at the cover of the new City of Toronto “Fun Guide”. The image of a smiling family on the cover was photoshopped to replace the original man in the photo with someone else.
A graphics editor at the National Post saw the suspicious-looking cover and decided to run it through TinEye. Sure enough, TinEye was able to locate the original image.
Compare the original image with the Fun Guide version by rolling your mouse over the image below.
- CamStand Fakorama
Note 1 (June 2): As @InvisbleGreen pointed out; the images could actually be licensed and the photographer simply lying about their origin. So a blatant lie but not theft per say.
Note 2 (June2): the photographs have been removed from the website without explanation so they were likely never licensed. See the website screenshot at the end of this post.
Note 3: Daryl Lang from PDN Online picked up my blog post. Read the comments to his story. Very enlightening. Not only were the photographs on The CamStand not taken by the photographers who claimed to have taken then but the photographer profiles were also plagiarized! We have to thank David for his incredible detective work!
I am at a loss for words as to why anyone would pass someone else’s work as their own. A word of advice: you are going to need to become a more sophisticated image thief if you really don’t want to be found. Between the community (I was tipped by a photographer that I will credit once I hear back from him) and tools like TinEye you are going to have to up the anty. Seriously up the anty.
Mr. Kent Arlington from Kent Manufacturing Company manufacturer of The CamStand which is basically a camera stand: I am not even sure you exist but I can tell you that the macro photographs that you claim are your first attempt at macro photography are actually someone else’s work and they certainly were created a long time ago, not on June 1st, 2009.
Let’s look at “your” photographs:
TinEye tells me the above photograph which you mention having shot yesterday is actually an istockphoto photograph created by zimmytws and uploaded to istockphoto on February 19, 2007. Here are the TinEye results:
The TinEye search results:
Maybe the first image was just a mistake. So let’s look at “your” second photograph:
hmmm… Not original again: this photograph was taken by sandsun and was uploaded to istockphoto on April 4, 2007. TinEye, the little search robot that can, got to work and found these results:
I still want to believe that may be one, at least one of the photographs you claim as yours, are actually yours. But no. All my hopes were dashed:
Your coin photograph is also an istockphoto image uploaded by Alina Vershinskaya on July 28, 2007.
And your strawberry photo? Well it belongs to Joanna Pecha and it was upoloaded to istockphoto on March 15, 2009.
I don’t know what to say except: stop stealing being unethical and claiming that a photograph is yours when it is not. You will get caught. And I am just going to assume that most of the photographs on your website The CamStand are fake and stolen come from istockphoto. A brief look at this page confirms it again: I suspect there is no Heather Fields photographer and if she exists she is stealing lying as the photograph are from istockphoto contributors:
The original which was shot by Jared Hudson and the TinEye search results:
Does the camera stand you are selling really exist? Kent Manufacturing Company: you need to clean up your act. Thanks and bye for now.
New blog post with removed images!
The CamStand website also includes a list of contributing bloggers who are photographers. You can see their profiles here:
These bloggers include Mr. Kent Arlington and Ms. Heather Fields. Their profile photographs are actually istockphoto photographs:
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