Do a search for “Henri Cartier-Bresson” using Google’s image search engine, and the photograph above is one of the results that pops up. Dig a little deeper into the results, and you’ll learn that it’s a photo by Cartier-Bresson showing French actress Isabelle Huppert.
Problem is, that’s all wrong. The woman in the photo isn’t Isabelle Huppert, and the photograph wasn’t snapped by the father of modern photojournalism. Read more…
I’m Google is an interesting Tumblr blog started in 2011 by Baltimore-based artist Dina Kelberman. It’s a running blog collage comprising Google Image Search photographs and YouTube videos. Kelberman writes that the content is compiled into a “long stream-of-consciousness”: as you scroll down through the seemingly-never-ending flow of imagery, you’ll notice that the sections of similar images flow seamlessly from one to another based on form, composition, color, and theme. Read more…
Google’s Images search engine is a useful tool for photographers in a number of ways. Search for a particular type of assignment or a theme, and you can browse through an ocean of inspiring photographs. Do a reverse search on your own photo, and you can look up whether it has been used without your permission online.
To make your image searching experience even more powerful and friendly, Google has been working on a significant redesign that aims to improve speed and usability. Read more…
We’re used to Google frequently improving things on its end — most recently adding pan and zoom to Google+ — but a constantly improving Yahoo! is a fairly new thing.
After numerous improvements to Flickr and a new Flickr app, Yahoo! has turned its photographic eye on Yahoo! Image Search. From here on out, you’ll be able to search all of Flickr’s creative commons images straight from Yahoo! Read more…
Lifehacker featured a great tip today courtesy of Redditor lifedeathandtech that’ll help you avoid scams when you take your chances buying camera equipment from sites like Craigslist. When you see a listing that seems suspicious, or you get an e-mail reply that seems a bit automated, plug the post’s photos into Google Images and see if they’re being used elsewhere.
All you have to do is drag and drop the image into Google Image Search or use the Search by Image extension on Chrome or Firefox. It’s not a foolproof method, but if the poster pulled the photos off the internet you’ll know. Now, if only this would help weed out the people trying to scam wedding photographers.
Filmmaker Daniel Mercadante and his team at Everynone created this short film titled “Ball” using hundreds of photographs of spherical objects found through Google Image Search. The images are grouped by themes that beautifully transition from one to another. Read more…
While visiting beautiful New York City earlier this year, an Australian photographer named Kiernan traveled to the top of the Empire State Building and snapped a photograph of the cityscape. After returning home, he decided to do a reverse image search on Google just to see what he might find. He was surprised to discover that the top result was a nearly identical photograph that was captured 36 years ago. Read more…
General consensus seems to be that a picture is worth a thousand words, in which case Ben West and Felix Heyes‘ unique take on the dictionary, complete with 21,000 entries, metaphorically contains closer to 21,000,000 words worth of content. That’s because their dictionary doesn’t hold a single word, only the first Google image search result for every word you might find in your regular Webster’s. Read more…
Xerox is showing off a new tool called Aesthetic Image Search over on Open Xerox (the Xerox equivalent of Google Labs). It’s an algorithm being developed at one of the company’s labs that aims to make judging a photograph’s aesthetics something a computer can do.
Many methods for image classification are based on recognition of parts — if you find some wheels and a road, then the picture is more likely to contain a car than a giraffe. But what about quality? What is it about a picture of a building or a flower or a person that makes the image stand out from the hundreds which are taken with a digital camera every day? Here we tackle the difficult task of trying to learn automatically what makes an image special, and makes photo enthusiasts mark it as high quality.
You can play around with a simple demo of the technology here. Don’t tell the Long Beach Police Department about it though — they might use it against photographers.
Src Img is an uber-simple bookmarklet created by Jarred Bishop and Hayden Hunter that lets you quickly do a Google Image search for any online photograph with just two clicks. It’s a simple link (i.e. bookmarklet) that you drag into the bookmarks bar of your browser. Whenever you want to search Google Images for a particular photograph, simply click the bookmarklet. It’ll overlay all the photos on the page with a “?¿” square. Click this to search for that photo. Voila!
