Barrett sent out a link today to the Idee – Piximilar Technology. It’s this application that searches through huge image archives (in this case, flickr), without keywords or metadata, to instantly retrieve visually similar images. Um, this is super cool and I’ve never seen anything like it!

You can search by similar images, uploading your own image, selecting multiple colors from a simple palette or an advanced color wheel to retrieve images containing the same colors. This is some serious sophistication in algorithms of color, shape, texture, luminosity, complexity, and objects. What’s crazy is the speed at which the program handles the information. It’s almost like magic – you have to try it for yourself.