Welcome to
, an interface to image searching.
This is a prototype, a proof of concept that image searching can be improved. Thanks for coming at my invitation to beta-test it, I'll appreciate all your suggestions, feature requests, criticisms and bug reports:
There are still many bugs and performance should improve in the coming days, but it is already usable. Hope you like it.
To begin testing type in something in the search box and hit 'Search', related thumbnails will appear soon (per Google Image Search). Go wild, search for something you're interested in —Monica Bellucci, Jennifer Connelly, Brad Pitt, or, subtlety aside, porn. Comics —Sandman, Ghost World, Dilbert, Maitena, Mafalda— and painters —John William Waterhouse, Vincent Van Gogh, Edward Hopper— are also great queries to get to appreciate the program features.
Things Not to Miss:
Scale-View: Move the mouse over a thumbnail and 2 rectangles will appear: the gray one represents your window, the red or green one the image the thumbnail stands for. They are meant to give you an immediate assessment of the image size¹.
Full Scale-View: Click around a thumbnail (but not directly on it) and all thumbnails will get those colored rectangles on them. Forget about muddling through pixel measures, just see the information, immediately, for all thumbnails. Click again to get things back to normal. Alternatively, pressing i activates/deactivates the Full Scale-View.
Interpreting a Thumbnail: After opening a thumbnail, it becomes semi-transparent if the image opened correctly, and white-striped if there were problems (image not found, hot-linking prohibited...). In the latter, white-striped case, one click on either thumbnail or opened image will handily delete both.Shift, click on a thumbnail/image to delete it.
Multiple Delete: (Just for thumbnails.) Holding Shift, click once and, without releasing your click, move the mouse around; you thus create a "catching" rectangle: every thumbnail touched by it will be selected; release your click and the selected thumbnails will be deleted. It is much easier than it sounds, you use it all the time to select multiple files.
Tabby Goodness: Search once, search again; your new results appear in a new tab inside Imagery! Hit , or . to move to the previous or next tab, respectively.+ or - to zoom in or out, 0 to zoom back to the original size, f to fit it to the screen, d to delete it, s to see it's source page, n to open it in a new window.p (or Alt+p if you're inside the input field).
Unopened Thumbnails: At the upper-left corner, beneath the Imagery logo, are the # of thumbnails displayed and the total # of results for your query; between them, green and inside parentheses, is the # of thumbnails that you've not yet opened. Click on the latter to hide all the thumbnails already opened. To again display them all, click on the # of thumbnails displayed (the first number). It's actually clear and elegant when you try it.q to give focus to the search field, Esc for it to lose it (yes, I'm obsessed with Wu Wei, acting without thinking). To reset the app to its original state, click the Imagery logo in the upper-left corner.Imagery will only work in Mozilla Firefox 1.5+, it will behave strangely in other Firefoxes, won't work in Microsoft Internet Explorer, and who knows what will happen in other browsers. Sorry for the browser fundamentalism; everything is so likely to change and evolve right now that worrying about compatibility seems like premature optimization. In the coming weeks, IE at least will be supported.
¹The 2nd rectangle is green when the image is smaller than your window, and red when it is bigger. Yes, the rectangles are often distorted to more efficiently use the space within a thumbnail, but don't let that confuse you, it's only the size relation between themselves what matters.