Stock image buyers are short on time. Anything to help find exactly the image they need is a huge plus for them. Read on to find out what Stocksy United added last week…
Stock agency collections are filled with hundreds of thousands (Stocksy) if not tens of millions (Shutterstock, et al) of images. Finding the image you need has long been the duty of the keyword search. You want an image of a bike, so you type in “bike” to the search line, hit enter and hope for the best. Unfortunately, you can end up going through page after page (hundreds!) of bike images without finding exactly what you need. That’s a lot of wasted time.
As one of a bunch of new and search discovery features rolling out over the next few months, last week, Stocksy added the “similar image” search. How it works is this. You’re working on a new project or design and are out surfing the internet for some brainstorming time. You see an image somewhere that is sort of along the lines of what you need, and you’ve saved that to your drive as inspiration.
Now, you can take that image, upload it to the Stocksy similar image search, and artificial intelligence will try and determine the subject and composition of that image and show you images similar to your inspiration.
For example, I grabbed this image of mine from Stocksy and saved it locally.
Then I used the camera icon in the search bar at Stocksy to upload it.
And finally, I admire the results it came back with…
Wow! It really works, and it exactly matched on the same image (the first result). It knew the subject was food, and it returned 150 images with the subject mostly in the center, shot from overhead. Very cool. Let’s try it with an image of a guy working out that I have on Fotolia, to see how it does.
Here’s what the image search returned as “visually similar”.
Boom! Nailed the subject matter as a person at the gym working out. Further down in the return, there were some a little closer to the angle and composition, but this return is a good start, for sure.
This last one really shows the power of this AI based smart image search. Here is an image from another Fotolia contributor:
I picked it out after a search on “mountain fog” on Fotolia. First, let’s look at a keyword search for the same thing on Stocksy.
Totally valid return. The images have mountains. The images have fog. But they aren’t exactly the feeling of the image that inspired me. (That’s something we’re working to improve.) Now, let’s use the visual similar search.
Holy guacamole!!! Exactly what I was looking for. How much time did that just save me? Excuse my wonderment – I’m just gobsmacked how it knew the important elements in the image and then found something visually similar. Technology is amazing.
So, next time you’re shopping at Stocksy, try out the new “visually similar” image search. It will definitely give you a head start on finding that perfect image. Another customer focused feature brought to you by the wizards behind the curtain at Stocksy.
