Phil Bradley's weblog

New royalty free image search engine

I've been told about Pikwizard, which is an image search engine for royalty free images. I've been playing around with it for a while, and it's really good. It's very clear, there are lots of images available and in the main they were right on topic. I was slightly bemused at one or two entries for my 'library' search (dried corn, pencils and chocolate for example) and it might be an idea to be able to flag some of the tags against images to let the users sort that out. However that's a minor quibble. The images are great - bright, fresh, interesting and most of them (in fact all of the ones that I looked at) are available under a Creative Commons Zero licence, which basically means you can do pretty much anything you want to with the images.

It's an excellent collection and one that I'm going to be visiting on a regular basis. 

Facial recognition search.

Facial recognition software really is a thing, and we'll see a lot more of it in the next couple of years. It has absolutely huge implications that I can't even work through myself at the moment, but let's see what we've got already. The first of two tools that I'm going to look at is the 'Celebrity model' site. The idea behind this is... well, let them tell it. I quote: "The 'Celebrity' model analyzes images and returns probability scores on the likelihood that the media contains the face(s) of over 10,000 recognized celebrities. This model is great for anyone building an app that relies on celebrity comparisons." So you could, I suppose, throw photographs at it and see if any of them turn out to be a celebrity. That's great if you're photographing people on a red carpet and have no idea if the person you've snapped is a real celebrity, hanger on, member of staff or whatever. The example that they gave was a full face image of the actor Morgan Freeman, and their software said that it thought it was him with a probability of 99.1% which I think is pretty good. Of course, they're going to use a good example, and not everyone is going to be face on in an image, but nonetheless. However, what's intriguing is that you can provide them with your own photograph and it will try and work out which celebrity you look most like. Just upload a picture and it instantly comes back with a response. Here's mine:

It seems to think that I look a bit like Jeff Bezos, and it's got a probability of 3%. This is actually good, because clearly I'm not, but the photographs do show a reasonable similarity, yet the recognition package knows I'm not him. That's interesting enough, but I hadn't even noticed a photograph of a woman in the background - I was at the opticians checking out new glasses and yet the package saw another face and reckons there's a 17% chance it's a model who I have never heard of, but I got a picture of her in a similar pose, and I can work out why it thinks it's her. 

The second recognition package, which I'm NOT going to screenshot is from a website called Mega cams at https://megacams.me/. I am NOT linking directly to this - you can cut and paste if you want, but as a word of warning, this is an adult webcam chat site with very adult imagery from the outset. People in various stages of undress will chat and well... you can work out the rest yourself. What you can do here is as they put it 'find your live sex doppelganger'. The idea, which is tacky in the extreme is to upload an image of your partner, ex, someone you fancy etc and see if you can find one of their webcam models who looks similar. Again, you can guess the rest. I tried it a couple of times and I have to say it's good. By which I mean it's accurate. The pictures of the webcam models that it returned did, with a slight stretch of the imagination, look like the people whose pictures I uploaded.

This stuff is obviously still at a very early stage, but I have to say that it's scarily accurate and will only get more so in the next few years. Take a photograph of people in a crowd, run it through one of these and if the software can link to Facebook profiles you're going to have a fairly good chance of seeing who those people are. There's a whole world of mis-use there. People search is going to get much more interesting in the coming few years!

Creative Commons debuts appalling search engine

I was really quite excited to see that a new resource has been made available for us to search for CC licensed images.  CC Search was launched a couple of days ago. The engine that they've created is a meta search engine, pulling results from the databases found at Flickr, 500px, Rijksmuseum, the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That's a total of about 9.5 million images that we can use. Filters allow searchers to limit results to images that can be used commercially, Modify, adapt, or build upon or both. You can limit your search to title, creator or tags, and you can also limit to specific collections as previously listed. If I create an account and sign into it I can save to a list or favourite it. I can also create my own tags and add those to existing images. All sounds wonderful so far, so what's with the 'appalling' reference?

Quite simply - and I know it's only in beta - it's a laughable search engine. A search for fox red labradors gives me lots of images of foxes, and little else, unless I start to scroll through. So the engine defaults to an OR search, and it's taking that quite literally. I can't run a phrase search, so "fox red labradors" gives me the same results. All I can do is search on single words to have any chance to get even vaguely what I'm after. This is no search engine at all! I would expect that even if something IS in beta, that the basics would have been taken care of, but obviously not. Now, yes, I expect issues and problems and things not quite being sorted out, but this is fundamental to searching! In its current form it's almost completely unusable. I can't even search for images that I've given CC licensing on because even though I limit my search to creator, it's looking for phil OR bradley, not both. 

Quite extraordinary. All that I can say is that I hope they'll release a rather more effective version in the near future, and if they do, I'll be sure to let you know. I really hope that they do, since it's going to be fantastic to use when it works. But it's currently a case of 'when' rather than 'works'. 

12 Royalty free image search engines

This is something that comes up quite a lot, as people are always looking for images that they can use without fear of payment or copyright restrictions. There's a nice new collection of such engines over at the Hootsuite blog, and I've picked a few of my favourites. 

Picjumbo It's a nice resource but only has a small number of images (600 or so), but they are of excellent quality. 

Unsplash is excellent - my search for 'books' returned a lot of results (277) and they were really interesting pictures.

Stockvault was another good site, and again I got a fair number of results for books, but the images were rather more boring to be honest. 

Negative space gave me a few book images, but I hadn't seen them anywhere else, so was happy with that. 

Kaboompics has a great name and some superb photographs.

Stocksnap has some really excellent images, and my books search gave me 145 really good quality and interesting images.

Splitshire had no books pictures :( but it did have some really fantastic images, so it's worth a look.

Life of pix has some really good very high quality and good resolution images. Only a couple of books pictures, but certainly worth exploring the database. 

Pexels is a multisearch engine with access to almost 4,000 images with more added every week. 

Jay Mantri is a photographer who has made many of his images freely available for people to do anything they want with them. No search option that I could see, but excellent landscapes and abstracts.

ISORepublic has free stock photos for creatives. Lots of excellent images. 

Free Refe is a good collection of high quality images. 

Giphy; a search engine for animated gifs

You've probably seen friends and colleagues sharing small animated images on Twitter and Facebook. 

via GIPHY

A bit like this one in fact. They can be a great way to make your point, or just have a bit of fun. It's now really easy to find these, by using Giphy which is a search engine for searching animated gifs. In early October Giphy passed 100 million daily users who send 1 billion gifs per day and viewers watch more than 2 million hours of gifs per day. 

To be honest, the search engine isn't that great - you're pretty much stuck with single word searching, so don't expect anything elaborate. There are a few basic categories that you can browse through, but it's not brilliant. Giphy does have some extra tools that you can use however to create your own animated gifs on your smartphone or tablet device, and you can upload them onto the site to share with other people. 

In summary, a poor search engine in terms of functionality, but great for finding funny and amusing images.

 

Related articles

Giphy Has Almost No Revenue But Is Worth $600 Million

Instant Logo Search

Need to find a company logo for some reason? Of course, you can go directly to their website, but it can then be a pain actually getting a copy and downloading it. This is where Instant Logo Search comes into play. Simply type in the company or organisation that you're interested in, and download the resulting displayed logo.

That's the theory of the thing anyway. Search works on character matching, so you start typing and you see the resulting logos appearing, or disappearing off the screen. This leads to slightly weird experiences - I thought I would see if Nestle has a logo available... as I was typing I got the PhillipiNE Stock exchange coming up. Lots of logos that I had expected to find were not there (levis, esso, BP, NATO...) but some were, especially if they were internet related. 

This doesn't mean that you can then just go off and use the logos however... the small print makes it very clear indeed. "Before you use or reproduce this artwork in any manner, you agree to obtain the express permission of the copyright and/or trademark holder. Failure to obtain such permission is a violation of international copyright and trademark laws subject to specific financial and criminal penalties."

However, a quick and dirty search tool granted. But I still think I'll just go to a search engine, type in the company name, then limit to images and take it from there. In summary, it's answering a question that no-one is really asking. 

LibreStock - multi search engine for CC images

If you're looking for images to use in a presentation or report, it can be a real pain to try and find ones that you can grab without legal problems. LibreStock is a free multi search engine that will check through over 40 different websites to find images that you can use. I quote from the site: "I know it's hard to understand complex legal licenses so let me break it down for you. all the photos indexed on LibreStock are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero license. this means you can use these pictures freely for any legal purpose." This means that they are free to use, even commercially, you can modify, copy and distribute, and you don't need to attribute.

That's great - so what about the images themselves? My search for 'books' came back with over 570 images from a variety of sites. A lot of the images however were nothing to do with books, including the one with a woman sitting on some steps looking at a penguin. (Don't ask me, because I don't know!) There were zero results for 'librarian' but everything else I searched for I got something back. There's no specific listing of all the sites that the engine pulls data from, but when you cursor over each image you'll see the source site and tags for each image.  

The images are of excellent quality - sharp and of a good size. Lots of variety, b&w, colour and I had the feeling that the vast majority came from professional photographers. Most of the photographs did provide information on who the photographer was - even though you're not obliged to include that information, I know that a lot of people would want to do so.

My main disappointment (indeed my only disappointment) was that it's a fairly small collection. However, it's easy enough to search through, and if you don't find what you want you can easily move onto another site. So if you're looking for excellent imagery, high quality and entirely free for you to do anything you want to with it, this is certainly a site worth looking at. 

Where and when was that picture taken?

There are times when it would be really helpful to know when and where a photograph was taken. It might be because you can't remember exactly where you were when you took the picture, or when it was taken and so on. Alternatively, you might be trying to find out information about the photograph in order to check its authority and validity. Thankfully there are ways in which you can do this, especially if the photograph was taken using a mobile phone, which stores huge amounts of information on the photograph in the EXIF data. There are tools that can pull this out for you. Let's take a look at a picture that I took of my dog Rusty not too long ago. 

In order to find out more about it, I can go along to Jeffrey Friedl's Image Metadata viewer and provide the resource with a copy of the picture. It thinks for a few moments and then comes back with 

As you can see, we're getting a huge amount of information about the image, and in particular when and where it was taken. There's a whole load of other information as well, which I've not bothered to include, but as you can see, it's quite impressive. You can also try it with images that you can find on the web, but this isn't always going to be perfect, since the required data may have been stripped out when it's been edited using a graphics package, so it's really helpful to get a copy of the original file when ever you possibly can. 

Geo search YouTube

If you want to find videos taken at or around a specific location at a particular period of time the YouTube search function isn't really the best of tools. Surprising given that it's from Google, but there you go. However, there is a very nice little geo search tool that you can use and its at http://youtube.github.io/geo-search-tool/search.html It's very basic, but powerful.

As you can see, not a lot even with advanced search functionality enabled. However the results page is good. 

Nice and easy to focus in on the location, or choose a video and see where it was taken. Of course it's going to be very useful if you want to see what videos were taken of, say a protest against government cuts to public services if you think that it hasn't been properly covered by the media. Or if you want to see what video was taken of a specific place at some period of time in the past, this is a good tool to try out. The time frame is very generous - from one hour to 3,6,9,12 hours, a week, month or year or a custom time period. 

Nice, simple and easy to use. 

New film search engine

If you can't remember the name of a film it can be a real nuisance, and it can nag at you for ages. Well, worry not. There's a new search engine called What is my movie and you can simply type in some basic concepts and it will try and find matches for you. I tried several and it found them every time. For example I tried 'gunslinger looking for gold in the American Civil War' and it came back with The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, 'man looking for family in the Civil War' gave me Shenandoah, 'two men on holiday in the lake district' resulted in Withnail and I. You can also try it with film quotes 'all the towns in all the world' came back with Casablanca (the best film ever made).

They say of themselves "Whatismymovie.com is a showcase of the technology of Valossa, which is a spin-off company of the University of Oulu, Finland. We aspire to create a new, descriptive way of searching video content. Our technology understands the contents of video files itself. Ranging from text to pattern recognition, we reach down into data that has not been searchable in the past."

You can help improve the engine by clicking on the buttons for a good or bad match. You can also run searches on Titles, Actors, Directors and Traditional Search. It's not clear to me what that last is, but you can use it! The display of results is really nice - you get a picture of the movie - usually a film poster, a nice abbreviated synopsis, a link to 'more like this' and you can also click on a link to watch the film, which runs an Amazon.com search and returns a price as well. 

It's a really nice engine, and one of those 'Oh, I'll just ask it one more thing' resources that keep you there for hours. Many thanks to Val Skelton for finding this one.