Written by Ben Parr
Sometimes it’s simply overwhelming how many gorgeous photos there are on FlickrFlickr reviews – sifting through them to find a picture to use on your blog or to just admire can be a chore. Luckily for us however, Flickr has an API, meaning that some creative developers have built alternative Flickr search engines.
Whether you’re just looking for a more feature-rich version of Flickr search or want to perform search in a completely different way, these seven Flickr search tools will serve you in finding that perfect photo.
Do you have a favorite Flickr search tool? Be sure to share it with us in the comments.
1. Compfight
Compfight is a visual Flickr search tool that displays searched photos based on tags or text. Beyond showing you pictures that match your search, the other cool thing about compfight is that it makes it dead simple to search for creative commons pictures that you can use for your blog. It’s a simple and fast-loading interface for Flickr searches.
2. Flickr Color Selector
Are you looking for cool pictures, but you really need them to match your website’s color scheme? Flickr Color Selectr searches through images on the popular photos site by differentiating by color. Just pick your color on the RGB chart.
Note: this search engine is partially in Japanese, but it doesn’t impede you from using this particular tool.
3. FlickrBabel
FlickrBabel is a mash-up of Flickr search and Google Translate. If you find a cool image but can’t understand the underlying text, FlickrBabel uses GoogleGoogle reviews translate to interpret the message. It also supports location-based searches. Heck, FlickrBabel even has its own Twitter account
4. FlickrStorm
The Flickr search engine is smart, but it isn’t perfect when you’re looking for photos related to a topic? FlickrStorm comes to the rescue. FlickrStorm pides search into multiple columns and suggests search refinements with additional related keywords.
5. Picishare
If you’re just looking for a straight-up alternative to Flickr search, then PiciShare may be one to look at. It has all of the meat – tag search, relevance, whether it’s “interesting”, and more. It also allows you to limit the number of photos that appear if you’re on a slow web connection.
6. Flickrriver
Flickrriver is a search tool that focuses on recent and interesting pictures – specifically ones uploaded in the last day or two.
7. Tag Galaxy
I can’t even explain to you how “out there” Tag Galaxy is as a Flickr search engine. It represents Flickr tags as the solar system. The keyword you use is the sun, related keywords are planets, clicking on any shows you a planet full of pictures. It is, by far, the most dynamic way to search Flickr.