Check out this great new tool from Google: Google Image Swirl.

Basically what it does is allows you to dial in images based on how close they are to the last image you selected.  For instance, you can search for cats and keep selecting cats until you find the exact one you’re looking for.  They take image properties into account, such as color and face composition.  I could be crazy, but it also looked like it was pulling out expressions.  Here’s an image of my experiment with cats:

Zac Johnson did a great writeup on how this is relevant to you and your Facebook ad campaigns.  I think it’s also relevant to the many other ad platforms as well.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Google Image Swirl Makes Finding the Perfect Image Easier

Google image search has always been a great tool for finding images of things, but it has never been great for really dialing down what you want based on the image composition.  They’ve recently added the ability to dial down your search by image type, which is great for finding specific things that you want.  For instance: I can search for line drawings of vermont.  Interestingly that search brings up a lot of maps.  Maybe in the future, they will add “maps” as a criteria.

Comparison

Google image search still isn’t as robust as something like iStockPhoto, but I think that is probably the culprit of some sort of technical difference in their systems (i.e. Google is indexing images and iStockPhoto is all user submitted images).  Because iStockPhoto has user submitted entries, they can enter meta data that Google just can’t derive from just the image.

Capabilities

Right now, you can filter image searches by news content, faces, clip art, line drawings, and photo content.  They are using photo recognition and search data to add additional meta data to the images.  For instance, the news content option checks the surrounding text around the images for meta data that pertains to news.  They can use photo recognition algorithms for recognizing facial structures in the images.

The Future?

I’m hoping maybe someday they will add features similar to iStockPhoto like color recognition and content layout.  Color layout is something that I’ve been looking forward to for a while now.  It’d make it really easy to pick up images that go with a specific theme in a website design or something to that effect.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Google Image Search Gets Upgraded