Flickr is an awesome place, whether it’s for photography inspiration, beautiful photos to be included in your projects (thanks to CreativeCommons) or even just to keep yourself entertained. It could be said that the greatest use of Flickr (other than getting to know how beautiful out world is) is that you get stunning photos that can be used in your designs.

This new tool – Multicolr, allows you to search over 10 million “explored” photos on Flickr that are licensed under a CreativeCommons license, by specifying colors.  ["Explored" photos on Flickr means, the photos which were featured specially by the team at Flickr based on the photos' interestingness].

If you’re designing a greeting card, a brochure or an image to be used in your blog post, you could easily search for very interesting CC-licensed photos from Flickr that could be used in your design. Since you are searching based on colors, the images will always blend with our current design. You can specify up to 10 colors. You may select a single color multiple times, which will increase it’s prominence.

I used the tool to search for images that contain the color of the theme we use here at Techie-Buzz and got this.

To that, added two yellow-orange colors and got this.

Reset all selections and gone for a dark combination and got this.

Pretty impressive ? You bet!

How did they manage this?
“We extracted the colours from 10 million of the most “interesting” Creative Commons images on Flickr. Using our visual similarity technology you can navigate the collection by colour.”

It’s a great way to use Flickr, which is great in itself. You can easily find awesome, legally available photos that blend with your designs and colors. Above all, it’s just fun to use.