Friday, October 30, 2009
5 Good Image Search Engines Apart From Google Image Search
Make Use Of: "When the right picture is everything, you need to go deep into the web and comb through the millions that are out there. Image search is just like normal search and similarly painstaking. Making it less so are the dedicated image search engines."
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The Incogna search engine sounds very helpful for designers. I often have an image of an arch, for example, and want to see several variations of it. Typing in "arch" in google requires several minutes of clicking through pages to find a similar silhouette myself. A search engine that categorizes by visual shape would not only save time but perhaps make connections between my arch and other objects that I would have never imagined. Simply brilliant.
I also really like the Incogna search engine. I was just playing around with searching for some images after reading this article, and the visual shape similarity search is awesome. It really helps to hone in on an image that you want. I also like the advanced search options of PicSearch. These are definitely places I will reference in the future.
This is awesome. I really like the idea of cyclops but I want to go through and try all of these. I can't tell you how sick I am of going to google and having to sift through photos. I just had no idea how to do this in a better way. one of these will help in many design projects to come.
Its nice that they have search engines exclusively for just images. I almost always use google and they always pull in more than just photos for the image search i am doing. I like that the websites they showed have great options for advanced search and i will definitely be using this in the future. Its funny that i just had a design project that Incogna would have been perfect for.
I always turned right to google image search for my image needs. If I couldn't find what I was looking for, I would turn to a stock photo site and then another and another until I found what I needed. With these search engines, I can easily search multiple sites at once and have access to many stock sites as I need for my image needs. With the upcoming research I will be doing for my show, these sites will come in handy.
This is a great set of tools for us designers. In our Design for the Stage class, several people struggled finding initial research when getting started. Often the problem was people using google image search and receiving images from the wrong period. Hopefully with additional images coming up, the accuracy also does. While we are encouraged to look for images in books and more reputable sources, it still would be a nice to have a simple search engine to get started. I'm definitely bookmarking these sites as a reference!
I always hate it when a project is done and everyone comes up with the same research images. I think that image search engines are integral part of many peoples processes within the theatre. As the saying goes... a picture is truly worth a thousand words.
I played around with Incognia and I love some of the new options for criteria of search. Things like shape similarity are amazingly useful and can really provide the ability to be able to find exactly what you see in your mind (because we do not think in just color/image size)
I feel a lot of our design projects that rely on "visual research" encourage us college students to simply type in a couple of key words into google and call it a day. Research should be fun. I've found some of the most incredible things from books and magazines, but our projects rarely give us the time or resources to accomplish such image searching.
However, knowing other sources online is amazingly useful. I use flickr for vintage photographs; there are entire communities of people who upload their family photos from the early 20th century for all to use. The internet is an amazing resource - really - we just need to remember how to use it properly.
I like the notion of Cyclo.ps. Apps that search other sites seem to work out well for me in terms of condensing and filtering. There's another one out there called Cool Iris that can be either run straight off Cooliris.com or used as a plugin for Safari. It allows for interactive searching within Google, Deviant Art, Picasaweb, Yahoo, etc. If nothing else, the interface is the coolest thing on the planet, so all you Safari users should get on the bandwagon.
This article is so useful! I can't wait to start using these! I particularly like Cyclops. The search function seems very intuitive. The incogna search function seems wonderful too! I can't believe you can search for something based on visual shape! That would make finding reference images so much easier! Thanks for posting this article!
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