joshwcomeau / Colourmatch

##ColourMatch ####Find beautiful photos from 500px, with colour

Rather than search with keywords, I thought it'd be fun to make a search-by-colour photo search engine. The project is live at http://colourmatch.ca/.

There are, in fact, other search tools that do similar things. Mine differs in how I judge colours as important. When you select a vibrant red, other tools will find images that are 100% red; A macro shot of a rose, a photo from the red light district where everything is bathed in crimson.

I was more interested in finding regular images with dominant outliers; the ruby-red lips on a tanned model, the red eyes of an albino cat.

At this point, this is just a proof of concept. I'm sourcing photos from 500px's database, but because I need to process images one at a time, I only have a repository of ~12k photos.

As a real tool, I would combine this with keyword search to allow for graphic/web designers to be able to find stock photography that matches the palette of their site. Say you own a travel agency, and for your website you want a hero image of some beautiful tropical destination. If your website colours are turquoise and red, you could use this tool to find a Bora Bora beach scene with pure turqoise water and a cocktail with a bright red cherry hung on the glass.

I think that'd be pretty cool.