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Show HN: I made a site to catalogue 10,000 CC0-licensed stock photos
- uvesten 11y agoI really like both the selection and the color chooser! Did you do any manual selection of the photos?
- davidbarker 11y agoThanks! The selection is mostly based on the source sites I chose, like Unsplash, which all have only good-quality photos. The aim was to show all of the images from those sites. The actual download and analysis of the images is done on my local machine, and each image has its own JSON file. These are then used to populate/modify the database, so I can track any changes to each image's data (if I add/remove keywords, for example) using Git.
- pigscantfly 11y agoHave you thought about automating keyword discovery or do you plan to stick with a manually-auditable dataset? http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.2306.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.2306.pdf
- franciscop 11y agoCheck also http://pixabay.com/ http://pixabay.com/ for Public Domain pictures, I've found many awesome gems there
- j_lev 11y agoHi - for some reason the search bar keeps changing my search terms eg Australia --> Australium
- davidbarker 11y agoSorry — that'll be the search trying to get a singular term from a plural. I've tagged the images with singular terms to make them easier to search, so it will change terms like "bridges" to "bridge", or "men" to "man", unless I override each term. If anyone can suggest a better way, I'd be very grateful. I'll add "Australia" as an override, for now. Thanks for pointing it out.
- awesan 11y agoInstead of changing the search term directly, you can silently search for both. Alternatively, you can use the Levenshtein distance to find words close to the search term (like its singular form).
- mintplant 11y agoHave you looked into using stemming? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stemming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stemming Most major languages should have a library available to handle this for you.
- bryanrasmussen 11y agostemming will be baked in to a search engine, for example elasticsearch or solr dependent on the language analyzer you use and how you map your fields.
- lucaspiller 11y agoVery nice! What are you using to search the photos by colour and feature?
- fratlas 11y agoProbably performed dominant colour analysis on each (like color-thief), sort by similar ranked colours using a closeness transformation like LAB? No idea for the feature though.
- elorant 11y agoIs there an algorithm for what you just described? I'm currently researching for color classification and it seems quite a complicated issue.
- fratlas 11y agoI'm currently trying to do this for my own side project, my current plan was analyse each photo using one of the many color analyser algos out there (color-thief seems to be popular/efficient), but the problem is, color is a very complicated thing to compare. I think euclidean distance for two LaB colors is the best for complexity to result ratio (and RBG to LaB is an easy/well-solved problem).
- elorant 11y agoI've come across this: http://developers.lyst.com/2014/02/22/color-detection/ http://developers.lyst.com/2014/02/22/color-detection/ Seems very good but I'm still researching. Hope it might help you.
- kamy22 11y agoHi, If you want you can contact me. I created a powerful algorithm to detect dominant colors in an image using K-means clustering and lab color space. Examples: https://twitter.com/kamy22/status/479040852028051456 https://twitter.com/kamy22/status/479040852028051456 https://twitter.com/kamy22/status/472517258418606080 https://twitter.com/kamy22/status/472517258418606080 Have a good day!
- vortico 11y agoI like the domain, the design is usable, and the database is great. This has it all.
- andreash 11y agowhat is the diff betweeen this and pixabay or pexels.com? which there was one meta-search engine to cover them all :)
- jlis 11y agonice one!
- BrunoJo 11y agoI always use https://pexels.com https://pexels.com. They also have only CC0 images.
- kjaer 11y agoThere's also http://librestock.com/ http://librestock.com/, which you can use to search Pexels, but also a few other sites.
- imrehg 11y agoStrange, I was curious what kind of images are there, did a search for "Taiwan", and the result is literally 8 pictures with "Shutterstock" watermark and that's all. Is that supposed to be CC0? Even if it was yes, would that be useful at all to have watermarked images like that?
- yitchelle 11y agoJust tried the same thing. It looks like the Shutterstock watermarked photos were an advert sponsored by Shutterstock themselves. No actual CC0 photos for the site itself.
- juiced 11y agoMy first search on "new york" returned nothing...
- hantusk 11y agoAn idea: You could use this pretrained machine learning library to classify your images/improve search even more: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/3yt4o5/deep_learning_in_a_single_file_for_smart_devices/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/3yt4o5/dee...
- Flimm 11y agoWhen of the about pages says that the photos are on a GitHub repo, which sounds really cool, until you follow the link and the repo hasn't been shared yet. Hopefully it's just a matter of time before it is shared. http://finda.photo/search/tips#contributing http://finda.photo/search/tips#contributing
- fareesh 11y agoI ran into a Laravel error on the homepage due to the server running out of memory.
- frantzmiccoli 11y agoIt seems that you do have a valid SSL certificate but https://finda.photo/search?q=test https://finda.photo/search?q=test is not working properly.
- chrxr 11y agohttp://finda.photo/image/14847 http://finda.photo/image/14847 - Tags are weird. This is not a dog, mouse, canine or feline. It's not sitting. It has 'eyes' but I think that might be irrelevant. Although I would agree that ferrets (not an included tag) are cute, I'm not sure I'd describe them as domestic. Otherwise, great!
- chrxr 11y agoI stand corrected: "The ferret (Mustela putorius furo) is the domesticated form of the European polecat" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferret https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferret
- pbhjpbhj 11y agoFerrets are relatively common domestic pets in the UK. Perhaps because the sport of ferreting was historically more prevalent here?
- chrxr 11y agoYes, I had to check as after posting the initial message I remembered seeing a child walking a ferret on a lead in Penryn. I've never seen one wandering the streets of Oxford though... They don't appear to make it into the top 10 pets of 2014: http://www.pfma.org.uk/pet-population-2014 http://www.pfma.org.uk/pet-population-2014 Perhaps a ferret adoption drive is necessary! http://ferretshelters.org/ http://ferretshelters.org/
- edpichler 11y agoJust curiosity, where the owner possibly find all these photos to fill up the database?
- brandonheato 11y agoWhy not just use flickr? A search for images with "No known copyright restrictions" returned 663,502 results. https://www.flickr.com/search/?license=7%2C9%2C10&text=&advanced=1&view_all=1 https://www.flickr.com/search/?license=7%2C9%2C10&text=&adva...
- ryanlol 11y agoI'm not sure if "No known copyright restrictions" means what you think it does.
- oliwarner 11y agoI like to think I am very conscious of copyright. I might not always adhere to it in my person life (who can claim they do these days?!) but professionally, everything is done strictly legitimately. With that in mind... Am I the only person who is slightly uncomfortable with the phrasing around PD and CC0? With other copyright licenses there is somebody there is saying they own something. I'm particularly uncomfortable with Flickr's "no known copyright restrictions". What if people infer PD from that and upload it somewhere else under CC0? Then it gets sucked into this finda.photo? Yuck. As for finda.photo, why are you truncating the source down to just a domain name?! Many of the sources include proper uploader details so why aren't you copying those over and displaying them? I know you're not required to, but attribution isn't a bad thing if you can give it. I for one would be much happier using a photo if I knew exactly where it came from.
- davidbarker 11y agoIf you look underneath each photo, there's a link back to each original page, as well as a link to the photographer's URL of choice (depending on the source this might be their profile on Unsplash, or their own website).
- oliwarner 11y agoWhen I posted this comment the source link was just the top level page on (eg) Unsplash, not the profile of the user there.
- davidbarker 11y agoDo you remember which image you're referring to? I haven't changed either the image data or the site code since your comment, so I'm curious to know which one it is and if I can update it.
- ghaff 11y agoOne of the challenges I have with attribution generally--and, to be clear, I try to be very careful with attribution on any CC, etc. photos that I use--is that the attribution is usually detached from the photo. (It may be stored in the metadata--or not.) So, even though I make a point of cutting & pasting the flickr links when I'm putting together a presentation, it's very easy for the attribution text and the photo to become separated on subsequent use. There are potential ways that you could fix this from a technology perspective, e.g. have a process to create a new JPEG with the credit below the original photo. But anything like this is going to be a bit clunky and potentially ugly graphically.
- petecooper 11y agoAdding Alana to the list of CC0-only stock photos. [1] http://alana.io/ http://alana.io/ [2] http://alana.io/about-us/ http://alana.io/about-us/
- scope 11y agoAdding to the list: Pixels [3] https://www.pexels.com https://www.pexels.com [4] https://www.pexels.com/photo-license/ https://www.pexels.com/photo-license/ They currently have over 5000 photos (~600 new images are added every month)
- trtmrt 11y agoFirstly it is slow... Secondly I have typed "wolf" and I got: 3 foxes, 1 lion, 2 monkeys, 1 snow house and 2 wolfs that do not look like wolfs !?
- davidbarker 11y agoApologies for the slowness. I suspect it was struggling under the traffic. It seems to be running pretty quickly now, though. Most of the images are automatically tagged, and can sometimes be incorrectly labelled. I'm aiming to work through and manually check them all. In the meantime, I might add the ability to flag incorrect keywords.
- thecodemonkey 11y agoIf you're still a little concerned with licensing and copyrights, I would recommend taking a look at www.graphicstock.com - you just play a flat monthly or yearly fee and you can download as much as you want. Disclaimer: I work for the company behind GraphicStock. Oh, and we're hiring!
- liamca 11y ago[Full disclosure, I work on a service called Azure Search] Very nice site! Since your site is so much based around search, I thought I would pass on a few suggestions based on what I saw. If you happen to be using a search based engine for your content such as ElasticSearch, SOLR or maybe Azure Search :-), there are a few simple things you could add to make the experience a little smoother. Suggestions in the search box are nice to allow people to quickly see results as they type. You could even add thumbnails of the images in the type ahead such as you see using the Twitter Typeahead library (http://twitter.github.io/typeahead.js/ http://twitter.github.io/typeahead.js/). I also noticed that your search does not handle spelling mistakes or phonetic search (matching words that sound similar). Finally, through the use of Stemming, search engines can often help you find additional relevant content. For example, if the person is looking for mice, but your content has the word mouse in it, this will bring back a match. Since you don't have a lot of content, this can really help people find relevant content. Hope that helps.
- chdir 11y ago> using the Twitter Typeahead library Unfortunately, it's no longer maintained [0], plenty of unfixed issues. You could try a recent fork [1] : [0] https://github.com/twitter/typeahead.js/issues/1424 https://github.com/twitter/typeahead.js/issues/1424 [1] https://github.com/corejavascript/typeahead.js https://github.com/corejavascript/typeahead.js.
- _spoonman 11y agoJust a really great job on this. Love it.
- m-i-l 11y agoLooks good. Feedback from a designer I showed this to: it would be useful to search based on aspect ratio (landscape vs portrait at minimum).
- davidbarker 11y agoThanks! That's actually already possible. There's a list of all the attributes you can search by here: http://finda.photo/search/tips http://finda.photo/search/tips For example, http://finda.photo/search/?q=--aspectratio+%3C+1 http://finda.photo/search/?q=--aspectratio+%3C+1 would give you portrait images.
- quaffapint 11y agoMight be a good place for an infinite scroll when going through pages of image results - one lest click they have to do.