CoolFlick: Flickr Embedding Cooliris Style
Cooliris is one of the best ways to flip through photos, enabling you to scroll through hundreds of photos effortlessly. Flickr is one of the best sites to search for photos. Combine the two and you've got CoolFlick, a service that lays Cooliris' thumbnail scrolling on top of Flickr - all from within the browser window.
Here at ReadWriteWeb we're big fans of visualizing data and content. When it comes to photos, Cooliris is one of our favorites. We've got it plugged into Firefox and on our iPhones. But, sometimes, it would be nice to have quick access to the Cooliris scrolling without having to install a browser plugin or having to jump out of the browser environment.
That's where CoolFlick comes in handy.
To begin searching for photos with CoolFlick, you can either go directly to the CoolFlick site to enter your query or you can string it into a URL like http://www.coolflick.org/index.php?q=portland. That's it. Using the search terms, CoolFlick loads up a series of matching photos. Then you can begin panning side-to-side and zooming in for more detail just like you would with Cooliris.
But here's something even better: You can take that view with you and share it with your friends. CoolFlick provides an embed code that allows you to add Cooliris viewing functionality to any site you'd like.
We first started testing CoolFlick with an eye toward browsing for photos. But there are some drawbacks to using the service that way. First and most obvious, you can only get photos ranked by relevance, not by other parameters. Second, there is no advanced search. The team here is always on the lookout for compelling photos licensed under Creative Commons. There's no way to discern that with CoolFlick. Finally, CoolFlick only provides a limited set of photos.
It would be great to see the service improve to include some of these features - or to implement other features offered through the Flickr API.
For now, we can overlook those flaws in favor of using the service to embed Cooliris views of content we find. Think of the applications: gathering event shots, sharing trip photos, compiling images by subject, displaying only images with the "coolflick" tag... the list goes on and on.
We're sure you can come up with some creative applications of this technology. To give it a try, visit CoolFlick and enter some search terms. To embed the view of the images you've found, click on the little "
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Thank you for posting about Cooliris, as always.
Coolflicks leverages the embeddable Cooliris technology available to developers from our website:
http://developer.cooliris.com/?p=embed
Detailed instructions show developers how to link photos from their Flickr accounts directly into an embeddable Cooliris 3D Wall that can be easily shared with others.
CoolFlick could also integrate with http://tineye.com for "Reverse Image Look-up" to give users the ability to research attribution and source of an image. From my limited use of the service, TinEye isn't perfect yet. I suspect it will get better over time as the data set gets richer.
Rick Turoczy said...
Second, there is no advanced search.
Alec & The Cooliris Team,
You might be interested in wavelet algorithm/s if you want to further develop an advanced search capability for Coolris. Wavelet can be used for multimedia search engine (ie, image, audio, computer graphics, video, etc...), where one can search for image that have similar features or tunes/audio segments that sounds similar, etc,... It can also be used for text search engine. It is a technique first originated in Physics and Signal Processing, but now it has found applications in wider domain such as Economics, Finance, Pattern Recognition and so forth. Here are just 2 examples of its potential web use, but you can get tons on information on wavelets (via Amazon books, Engineering/Computing journals and of course on internet).
Content-based image retrieval using wavelets (image-search & retrieval)
A novel document retrieval method using the discrete wavelet transform (text-search & retrieval)
I can see that your team includes engineers from Stanford. I had used the popular Stanford open-source wavelet toolbox called WaveLab (written in Matlab by Prof. David Donoho, et, al) in the past for certain projects, and I will use it again in future projects if wavelet functionality is required. The FBI is using wavelet for its fingerprinting matching database retrieval, this explains why the FBI is taking a shorter time now for checking one's fingerprint against the database, compared to weeks in the pre-wavelet database.
Alec & The CoolIris Team,
Here is another one that might also be useful to you.
ABSTRACT
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Multimedia Retrieval is one of the most important and fastest growing research areas in the field of multimedia technology. Large collections of scientific, artistic and commercial data comprising image, text, audio and video abound in the present information based society. There must be an effective and precise method of assisting users to search, browse and interact with these collections. This paper has proposed and implemented a content based video retrieval system using Haar wavelet, Daubechies D4 wavelet transform and five different types of clustering techniques. The experimental results show that the Haar wavelet with 3- Level transform can perform best with a high retrieval accuracy rate (89%).
Performance analysis of using wavelet transform in content based video retrieval system
Got to know about this wonderful tool on Cooliris only recently and today about CoolFlick!
Thanks for the post!
i love Cooliris - WEB3D.0!! amazing app for Flickr!!
Posted by: Billy Warhol
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January 25, 2009 2:41 AM
This combo definitley makes Flickr 10x cooler!
Cooliris is pretty cool, but not really usable for me yet as there is no easy way to interact with the photos on Flickr -- same would seem to go for this app.
Cooliris could fix this in two very easy ways.
1. Allow the cmd/ctl click of an image to open it in a browser tab in the background.
2. Allow faving in CoolIris (by preference) to also fave images at Flickr directly.
Switching back and forth between viewing in CoolIris and interacting with photos directly on Flickr is burdensome and time consume for active users.
I really would *love* to use CoolIris, but until they figure out a better way to interact with images on Flickr I probably won't.
Thomas, Thanks for the feedback on Flickr support. (BTW, I'm a fan of your photography and follow you on Flickr). We'll definitely look into these ideas in future version of Cooliris.
Ron