Subscribe Now!Search flickr the fun way
January 9th, 2007 by Anita Bath
I always get frustrated searching for specific pictures via Google Images or Flickr. I know what I want to use, but it takes forever to find it. For this reason, I was elated to find retrievr.
Retrievr lets you draw a picture (or even upload one), then uses your drawing to search Flickr for similar pictures. Here was one of my attempts to draw my favorite cartoon character, SpongeBob:
Before you ask: yes, I’d be happy to create custom artwork for you, but the immense demand for my artistry forces me to charge very high rates (also, my 2 year old son says I can’t sell this SpongeBob picture, sorry). OK, so I was pretty excited to see the results, but here’s what came up:
Maybe the picture in the middle was SpongeBob, and was removed from Flickr for copyright reasons? The pin cushion looks a little like SpongeBob though … perhaps an uploaded picture will work better. What better test than to upload a photo originally from Flickr? Here’s a flickr photo that I showed a couple days ago in our Funny Signs post:
And here is what Retrievr found:
Hmmm … so Retrievr thinks there’s a 2 in 9 shot that the picture is a sign … not too accurate. It appears to rely heavily on shape outline and color. Even if it doesn’t work real well, it’s a lot of fun to try. Personally, I was more impressed by the recognition capabilities of MyHeritage when we did our fun Celebrity face recognition test.
Special thanks to LadyBanana for giving me the idea to find a better way to search Flickr.
Wow, that’s amazing…ly inaccurate.
One of the search engines used to have something like this (Alta Vista maybe?), and as I recall the results were quite a bit better. Strange that this idea hasn’t taken off more.
Oh boy! The possibilities for naughty images here is amazing!
(Booting up my drawing software …)
LOL oh yeah seems like it could be a tad more accurate. I think it based it’s search mainly on color. We’ll give it a C for nice try. LOL
I’m disturbed at both entries retrieving flowers as possible answers.
Can I order some custom-made artwork? I’m willing to pay good money.
Do you take Monopoly?
Spongebob looks better than anything I could draw. So I have no artistic talent - Sue me.
How neat and strangely clever!
The pincushion match is brilliant!
I agree about the colors. I had fun testing it, and it did a fairly good job based on the colors I chose-not so much what the picture was of.
I like to use http://flickrleech.net/ when searching for random pics. It’s super fast too, so it makes for an enjoyable browsing experience.