Wednesday, July 6, 2011

App to search within photos.

Text recognition has been there for ever since OCR (Optical character recognition) has been around. Google search even integrated this in their search Algo a while ago.

But how come no one has come up with an App (for phones and PCs) to be able to install and just search your personal pics. This App can be configured to point to your photos folder where it 'indexes' this pictures and optically recognizes text in them. It might take a while to index all the pics, but it will be only one-time deal for all existing pics.

I even want to take it a step further and say - why just recognize text in pictures, why not recognize objects like, flower, roads, sea, trees etc.... So next time I have to look for a pic, I do not have to go through the pics or go through my haphazardly organized folders to look for a pic.

All I do is search for 'Ruchi+ucd graduation+stage+black dress' or 'ocean+tree+rocks' and it shows me the list of pics to sort through.

4 comments:

  1. Could that be done by tagging the pictures? So, every picture would have a tag associated. The search would be done on these tags to look for your search keywords.

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  2. That is a very good point. You can tag people and objects in the picture. But I want something that intuitively 'suggests' tags, so that I do not have to tag almost everything in every picture. I should have to option to change the tags the app suggests.

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  3. Great idea! Especially keeping in mind that phone is becoming a growing means of taking pictures with. If the location services is activated for your pictures then you should be able to search by address or zipcode too.

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  4. Yes, pictures are already being Geocoded (if you allow your phone to do it). The functionality that is missing is relating the Latitude/Longitude to address/zipcode/city etc. Which again is available via Google/Yahoo APIs - just that there is not an App out there that will do it for you. The only problem with using just these API's is that there will be places where there are no cities or zip codes. E.g. National parks. In that case we need to just find the broader area like the park name and tag it.

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