wikiview is a Powerful Photo Browser for Exploring Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons has millions of public domain and freely-licensed photos available to the world, and now there’s a powerful new tool that helps you dive into the ocean of imagery for exploring or locating exactly what you’re looking for. It’s called wikiview, and it’s a graph-based visual image navigator.

The project was developed by Visual Computing at HTW Berlin, the same researchers behind Picsbuffet (a Fotolia stock photo explorer) and Akiwi (a semi-automatic image tagging service).

wikiview puts 12 million Wikimedia Commons images at your fingertips. You can start off your journey by entering a search term, starting with a random search, choosing a color, or by uploading a photo you’d like to find similar images for.

Photos results are grouped by similarity and displayed in a visually-sorted 2D image map. You can zoom in and out on “similarity,” and you can also drag the map around to find more similar results.

wikiview was presented last month at the ACM Multimedia 2019 conference in Nice, France, and won 2nd place for the “Best Demo Award.”

Head on over to wikiview.net if you’d like to start using the powerful tool yourself.

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