Welcome to Imagery, an experiment in image searching started all the way back in 2006. It's been evolving since in fits and bumps.

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.

Opening a Thumbnail: Click on a thumbnail and the image it represents will open below, instantly, in the same page (!).

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.

Single Delete: Holding 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.

Quick Zooming: Click on an opened image and drag the mouse left to zoom out, right to zoom in.

Quick Zoom to Fit: Double click on an opened image to zoom it until it fits your screen (maximizes). Double click it again to return it back to normal.

Keyboard Shortcuts: I've made a point of there being lots of ways to do the same thing. For instance, hovering over an image, try the following keyboard shortcuts: + 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.

Preferences: Do try out the different search preferences there are by clicking the link named Preferences, right next to the Search button. Alternatively, hit 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.

Misc: Hit 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.

Some background

I started thinking on this project soon after getting a 23" monitor and getting irritated by all the space that was being wasted when googling for images. Reading the oh so painfully beautiful book Visual Explanations, by Edward Tufte, inspired me in many ways, specially to try to find a better way to show image sizes. Witnessing Saltimbanco, by the Cirque du Soleil, just when I was getting started, was the trigger I needed: it made me want to do something beautiful myself.

Here's the very first sketch (in Spanish) for this web app, and here's the second, more polished one (in English). Note that the rectangles ended up representing something different.

Thanks

Special thanks go to Faby, who always believes in me and who has great ideas for cool interfaces; to Alejandra, Paulina and Miguel, who endured me and my endless "usability tests", and who gave me great suggestions; to Martha, my conscience, who laughs my joy; to Adolfo, for taking me seriously, giving me great feedback, and being my human-timer; to Gema, for finding some time to beta-test; to Sean, also my human-timer, for much needed friendly pressure. The greatest debt, as always, I owe to my parents, who made this all possible.

Made with Vim, Rails, Firefox, and loads of fruits. On a Mac.

That's it, that's the story. Thanks for visiting and reading. Don't forget to get in touch if you feel like it.