Lea Murphy A huge body of work that I've created is an on-going photo project of my niece Rachel. I began by not keywording at all. BIG MISTAKE. Then when I did start I was being far too specific...things like Rachel, blankie, thumb, foot, shoe, porch, kitchen, swing, park...so I essentially became overrun with keywords and finding the specific image was dependent on my knowing what else (besides Rachel) might be in the image or where it was taken. oh man, I wish I could find a link I sent aaaages back about an image locater freeware program, it allowed you to find images of a like type, or images based on a sketch you could scribble up (the example used was a london double decker) While I continue searching the some 200,000 + emails I have, let me offer up: "Image Duplicates Search Tool" (untested by me) http://ir.codeplex.com/ there's also a rather demonic concept called Sketch2Photo (formerly photosketch) (untested) http://blogs.zdnet.com/weblife/?p=965 "PhotoSketch is an "Internet Image Montage" project from five Chinese Computer Science and Technology students at Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore. The basic premise, which they present in the form of a research paper [pdf], works like this: Step 1. Draw the outlines of the figures you want in your picture - anything from seagulls to a Mercedes, whatever tickles your fancy, Step 2. Add labels for each of the items, as well as for the background. Step 3. PhotoSketch will then find real-life images to match your doodles and put them together in a Photoshopped image that will make your jaw drop." http://cg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/montage/ then there's IBM's effort: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ibms_image_recognition_powers_sapir_search.php Oh yay, while writing I found the email =) the program is called Imgseek. (and now they have a mac version) "What is imgSeek ? imgSeek is a photo collection manager and viewer with content-based search and many other features. The query is expressed either as a *rough sketch* painted by the user or as another image you supply (or an image in your collection). Imgseek then goes to work searching through you images to find images like the one you scribbled or the one you supplied! Features 1. You simply draw a rough sketch of what you want to find and imgSeek displays for you a thumbnail view of the best matches. or 2. Query images similar to one in your collection by double-clicking on it's thumbnail. Group your photos by similarity for easy browsing. You may also have them clustered automatically by color, date (group events automatically using an adaptive clustering algorithm for time differences), filename or image features. Edit metadata (description, camera, lens, etc) for every image, and use them on the HTML albums generated or for searching photos. You can also use custom metadata fields. EXIF and IPTC data found on JPEG/TIFF files are automatically imported. (Read-only support) Advanced command-line utility to scan for new files, query for similar images and show image metadata. (You may use it on your cron system for example) Transform images or batches automatically: Place text captions, change brightness, contrast, blur, etc. Apply lossless rotations automatically if jpegtran is available. Generate HTML albums for the entire collection, a given directory or similarity group Advanced keyword searching for metadata. Find all duplicate images on your collection with the parameters you specify. (dimensions, filesize, filename, similarity, average luminance) Organize and browse pictures in groups with an easy drag & drop interface. You can also perform advanced queries on groups (eg.: show me all images that belong to group A and B but not group C) Support for multiple volumes of pictures. You may assign all images on a CD to a given Volume Automatic thumbnail generation and caching. Using this standard, which is also used by Gimp, Nautilus/Gnome, Rox Desktop, gThumb and others. Supported file formats are jpg, gif, bmp, png, xbm, and pnm. If you have ImageMagick installed, imgSeek will also support over 87 image formats. Rename a file or batch of files automatically: Replace strings, convert to upper/lowercase, append a string, create numbered series, etc. Add images to the database from a directory recursively. User friendly interface that remembers typed queries and drawn sketches for later usage. Slideshow for a given directory, whole collection or for a chosen group of similar images. You can also delete and organize images in groups with hotkeys. Browse images by thumbnail and view them on a preview window. Browse your system files for images, and bookmark your favorite directories. While browsing, you may query for similar images on your collection from: http://www.imgseek.net/index.html before disregarding this freeware, take a peek here at heir screenshots: http://www.imgseek.net/sshot/
