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Flickr Tools Tag Galaxy

Martin Brinkmann — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:37:04 +0000

Tag Galaxy is one of the Flickr Tools that visualizes Flickr image browsing utilizing tags and planetary constellations to show their related tags. A search for night for instance displays the related tags light, sky, dark and city rotating around the central tag. The interesting aspect of this display is that a click on any other tag other than the main tag will combine the old tag with the new tag to include only pictures that have been tagged with all tags.

Clicking on the central “star” will close in on that star and fill it with exactly 235 picture thumbnails. The planet can be rotated with the left mouse button and zoomed with the mouse wheel. A click on a preview image will load that image in front, another click will load information about the picture like the name of the artist, a description and a link to the Flickr page.

The Flickr page of the selected photo are loaded in a new tab. The user can use the navigation on top of the screen to load another batch of thumbnail pictures from Flickr which replace the old photos shown on the planet.

Tag Galaxy provides an intuitive way to browse for photos on Flickr. It does require a good chunk of system resources though to function properly. Computer memory usage went up between 250K and 400K when using the service.

Fast Flickr Search Tool

Martin Brinkmann — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 08:41:54 +0000

The search possibilities on Flickr are not optimal in my opinion. The search is rather slow, displays only a few results and does not make good use of the screen space at all. That’s something that the fast Flickr search tool over at compfight does much better. As soon as you have entered your search term and hit the search button it begins to fill the screen with related thumbnails that it found on the Flickr website.

My screen was filled with more than 60 thumbnails and an option to load additional ones by either clicking on a link or simply scrolling to the end of the page. Hovering the mouse over a thumbnail displays the resolution of the original images and a click loads the image’s page at Flickr in a new tab. The results are somewhat filtered and reduced to 16 pages that contain roughly 1000 thumbnails of images. That’s a limitation but not a severe one I think.

Four options are available on the main search page. By default the script searches all images at Flickr, tries to find the original images and has safe search turned on. It is possible to search only for tags, only for Creative Commons images, to turn safe search and the search for original images off.

I like the website because it displays a lot of images at once on the screen which speeds up the process of browsing Flickr for interesting images.