A neat search engine from photo sharing company 500px uses sketches to help you find the photos you’re looking for — and, luckily, it doesn’t matter if you can’t draw.
500px claims the search engine, called Splash, is “a completely new way to search for images”. Instead of inputting words to find corresponding images, Splash takes a user’s sketch and tries to find images that match.
In practice, it sort of works — my “illustration” of a “landscape” gave me back the following results:
The pictures aren’t an exact match, but Splash did manage to get fairly close to the colour and composition. 500px doesn’t say how exactly it works, but notes that the leader behind the project, Renat Gataullin, heads up 500px’s machine learning division.
One downside: The images are based on 500px’s database, which is slightly more limited than, say, Google Images or Flickr. But that hasn’t stopped Reddit users from having a fun time trying it out. And by that I mean nudity.