It feels very good to finally get this one off my chest! I’ve been meaning to build a nice Flash interface for image search for a long time now. I tried it in Flash 7, but it turns out that most of the images on the web are progressive-JPGs. Since Flash 8 can handle progressive JPGs, if figured I had to git ‘er done. Check out the app here.
The search results are courtesy of Yahoo’s fantastic Image Search API. Originally I had tried to connect to Google’s image search by using screen-scraping, but it turned out to be much easier to hook up to the Yahoo API, which returns nicely formatted XML.
The interface is designed to be a simple as possible, while retaining some powerful features. Hopefully this is something that is genuinely useful and will “empower image searchers across the world” (cue dramatic music). Check out a more in-depth description of Simple Image Search here. Please let me know if you have comments, suggestions or bugs.
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Only support english keyword search?
Very nice! I did notice though, that if I am editing the text in the search box, the arrow keys and backspace button affect the results view.
Great! work This is so cool, congratulations. Will there be a fla available for learning purposes? Thanks.
Mind writting a little bit about how you made the pane that allows for more thumbnails by dragging to the right. Out of the entire application I am most excited about how you pulled that off! Would it be possible to place a thumbnail zoom in/out button in the same pane?
Technically excellent and well-done graphically. I have to say it… well done!
God: from my limited testing, SIS supports non-English keyword search. The text input will accept non-English characters. A search for “Brücke” returns pictures of a bridge.
Christopher: I will fix that issue. Thanks!
Will: I do not intend to release the FLA in the near future.
Wade: The resizable thumbnail pane is an extension of the resizable nature of the whole app. The app will re-lay itself out any time the browser window changes. The logic here is fairly simple. Some dimensions have a minimum value set and cannot be re-sized below that value. I used Flash 8’s 9-slice scaling to resize the panels while keeping the rounded corners. Everything is rounded off to the nearest pixel.
When the thumb pane is resized, the code calculates the maximum number of thumbs that can be displayed in the panel. The tricky bit was repositioning the thumbs to allow for the left-right smooth scrolling. When you scroll to the far left, the first thumb should always be at the top-left. After calculating what thumbs need to show in the pane, the code checks to see if all those thumbs have been downloaded yet. If not, a new query is sent out to grab those thumbs from Yahoo.
Patrick: Thanks!
Regarding non-english keyword search, I’m now URL-encoding the search term, which greastly increases the number of results. “Brücke” now returns 91,534 results instead of 895.
Nice job. I wish you planned to tell us how you did it. I don’t really know what I would do with the information if I had it. I might try to make my own and if I did it would have more thumbnails per page. Lots more. I search images a lot and more images per page would be helpful.
steven: did you try expanding the thumb pane by dragging the divider?
Any chance you could support yahoo’s SafeSearch? Without it yahoo images is full of stuff I’d rather not see.
what’s the format for linking to a specific search? like:
http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/simple_image_search/search.php?tigers
thanks.
jake
Hi there!
I have recommended you clean,useful and nice ‘simple image search’ in my brazilian blog. so you might get new visitor from below the equator today!
love,
Rosana Hermann
(I’m also searchable in your engine!)
I really loved and used this search often. It is one of the best I have seen. However, recently, the interface no longer works. It displays the first set of thumbnails, but no main image and the counter shows 0 of 0 for any and every search you do. I would love to see this work again. Did something change at Yahoo??
Thanks for the help…
First keyword I searched was “pink” and I got porn… 😐
I don’t know how to explain this one…
I think I clicked the image that loaded on the right more than once really fast and I ended up seeing 2-3 images overlapping…
It is really cool. I wonder how you can get images more than 1000 which is the limit set by Yahoo.
I carefully tried by keeping pressing “Next”.:)
Hi
How about a mobile version?
As like a downloadable swf that can be viewed with an installed mobile flash player.
Or an executable mobile version for the latest Symbian platform.
I have a google image search screen scraper I wrote using Flash 8. Would you be interested in hosting the .swf and the source .fla here for people try/download?
Great Work
hi,
Sorry my english.
The pictures coming from where. Any stock photos site? or from google?
She’d be dismissed early from beaches all inclusive resorts detention. Because of his genitals.
wonderfull
Hi, there!..04f231572c36bebcb1f6febfb12ec6e9
weird sex positions
Dude… this needs to be cleaned up… porn comes up when you type in just about anything please fix it….
Hi Felix.can i donwload the app?I’m very interested in it.but I find the page:http://cn.gallery.yahoo.com/apps/2073.I can’t download it..
One more for Fotki! Thank you so much!
I like how you can look at porno pictures
Hi, it’s excellent I use it a lot, but now not work, is some trouble with him?