Searching Flickr By Drawing A Sketch

The first thing I have to tell you is that this doesn't work very well. The second thing I have to tell you that even if it doesn't work very well it makes an awesome toy and you should go play with it right now. Search Flickr by "drawing" what you're looking for with Retrievr (http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/.)

When I first heard about this I thought, "Oh wow, so I could like draw a picture of the Eiffel Tower and it would find me pictures of the Eiffel Tower!" No, not quite. It appears that application matches large shapes and colors rather than finer shapes. It's still cool.

Retrievr appears to be a flash application. There are drawing tools and a color palette available. Pick a color, pick a thickness for your drawing tool, and sketch out what you're looking for. The Flickr thumbnails on the right will refresh with pictures that Retrievr thinks matches what you're looking for. (Click on the pictures to go straight to the Flickr pages.)

I tried drawing symbols -- corporate symbols, question marks, etc -- but wasn't having much luck with my matches (though I found some really cool pictures.) Then I tried searching for blocks of color -- coloring the bottom half of the drawing area blue. Retrievr matched a bunch of seawater/ocean pictures for me. I then colored most of the top half of the drawing area in light red (I was going for sunset pictures.) I didn't get many sunset pictures, but I did get a lot of landscape/horizon pictures -- Retrievr had a good general idea of what I was going for. You can go too far, though -- adding a stripe of green (forest? Curl of a wave?) blew up the search results into a hodgepodge.

Try for large hunks of color and some shapes for the best results. You won't be able to find electronics schema screenshots with this, but it's an awesome way to browse; I found some great pictures.

Posted to Aesthetics-Art-Photography | TrackBack