Image searching made easier
Jinfo Blog

5th August 2009

By Penny Crossland

Item

In this era of the ‘visual’ searching for images on the web should be part of every infopro’s repertoire. Now the task of searching through the vast array of photos available has become a little easier with a new desktop application called Ginipic (http://www.ginipic.com). Devised by an Israeli start-up, the application allows users to search photo-sharing services such as Flickr (http://www.flickr.com), Photobucket (http://www.photobucket.com), Google and Bing, as well as their own computer for images by entering search terms. Filtering by several criteria allows for precise results, which can be pre-viewed. Selected images can be shared or saved an, most usefully, can be dragged and dropped to the desktop or other applications. The big search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing are increasingly recognizing the importance of image searching, with Google Images and Flickr (owned by Yahoo) being the most popular image search tools. Now Flickr has updated its image searching facility (http://digbig.com/5badhy) by making results easier to preview, ultimately saving time in what can be a laborious search process. Search results are now displayed as thumbnails across the page and allow users to hover over images to obtain useful information such as comments, tags, location and date. A drop-down menu allows you to search by special collections (such as agency photos), your own or your friends’ collections. Slideshows of selected images are also available. As Cindy Shamel stressed in her excellent FUMSI article on finding images on the web (http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/find/3873), keeping up to date with these types of sources can only enhance the infopro’s ability to search for competitive intelligence and business information.

« Blog