Images and Tools, Flickr Seems to Have It All!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/41522047@N03/3950699247/

When you get a chance look at that photo. I think it is an amazing photo. Maybe its something about all the different greens present or just how nature has totally over-run that building, but it just looks beautiful. I was thinking about how nice it would be to have a picture from the same place back when that building was new. I wonder how much time has actually passed to make it go from what it was to what it has become.

Flickr is a neat tool for sure and having spent some time bumming around the site I can see why people are so attracted to it and take advantage of it. I hope that it remains big because it saddens me to think of it going out of business and people possibly losing all of their pictures. I really wonder what the Flickr people would do if they knew they were going to be shut down. Would they do everything possible to warn people and get them to move their stuff. Do you think another company would quickly jump up into its place and fill the gap?

While looking over the various mashup tools I came across one in particular that seems very interesting and potentially fun or useful.

http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/

That is the link to it and I encourage you to take a look. The premise is that you can draw in something, anything into the space and then the app will pore over the photos on flickr finding all the photos that could possibly match what you have drawn in. It seems like aside from the random fun factor it could be useful when you have an image in mind but cannot think of what it might be. Maybe you know what a mountain you went climbing on looks like but not what it was called, there is a chance someone else has taken a picture of that same mountain and has tagged it with the name. I personally used it to create a horrid attempt at drawing a dog but I was rewarded with many cute and wonderful pictures of dogs.