RetrievR
retrievr is an experimental service which lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickrimages by drawing a rough sketch.
Currently the index contains many of Flickr’s most interesting images. If you’d like to have yourimages (or the images for a specific tag) added, please let me know. A submission interface is planned!
Yes! That is, it depends. (Mainly on your expectations!)
In my experience, the results are usually fairly good, sometimes even stunning – considering the artistic sophistication most of us are able to come up with (gallery forthcoming); and in the cases they’re not so stellar, they are at least entertaining ;-) But clearly, the approach has its limits.
One thing to keep in mind is that retrievr doesn’t do object/face/text recognition of any kind, so if you’re drawing an outline sketch of a chair, it almost certainly won’t get you one back (except your index only contains images of chairs). The same holds for corporate logos, icons &c.
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 removedetail 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.
