Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

searchr

Earlier this week, I ran across Retrievr, an interesting way to search Flickr photos by color or sketch. A search on Retrievr doesn’t return an extensive number of photos, and the interface isn’t as intuitive as it could be (no “search” button to intiate the search?), but it’s an interesting creative exercise at searching non-text items using non-text search terms.

A description of how it works from the site:

It helps to think of it as matching the most pronounced shapes and slabs of colors.

Another thing to know is that there’s currently no way to specify the aspect ratio, so you have to rescale the image in your head (things that are close to the borders of the image you’re thinking of should be close to the borders of your sketches), but that’s really more of a missing feature of the drawing flashlet than an inherent problem. Sometimes it also helps to remove detail instead of adding it.

Personally, I see retrievr more as an “exploration” tool than as a “search” tool, and it seems to work very well for that.