Without further ado, here are the first four (of many more to come).

C-SPAN Video Library

• Cost: free
• In three words, amazing, important, essential
• With a few exceptions just about every program that have aired on C-SPAN, C-SPAN 2, C-SPAN3
• More than 170,000 hours of content, back to 1987
• Advanced search interface
• Important to remember that C-SPAN carries more than what goes on in the Senate and House of Representatives
• Hours and hours of author interviews, political rallies, interviews with newsmakers and journalists and much more
• Most programs are full text searchable using mechanically generated transcripts
• People search allows you to quickly see if a person has appeared on the network and then link directly to the program(s)
• Example: Larry Page (he’s appeared on C-SPAN Twice)
• Many programs are embeddable
• Most programs appear in the archive within a day or two (if not sooner) of airing.
• The C-SPAN Video Library won a prestigious Peabody Award in June

Old Maps Online

• Cost: free
• Officially launched last week
• One search, centralized access to multiple digitized historical map collections
• About 60,000 maps available today, with more than 120,000 maps by end of 2012
• Keyword search, focus by date using slider, search by map
• Material included so far:
  • A Vision of Britain through Time, Historical Map Library
  • British Library, Map Library
  • David Rumsey Map Collection
  • Moravian Library, Mollova mapová sbírka

Archive-It

• Cost: free to search; fee for institutions to subscribe
• Archive-It is a fee-based service from the Internet Archive that works with non-profits, schools, governments and others to crawl and archive sites and pages they specify
• Many of the collections are available to all
• Close to 1,700 collections currently available
• Example: Archive of NASA Social Media
• Collections are updated regularly with new material
• Unlike the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, Archive-It collections are keyword searchable

Road 2.0: Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions

• Cost: free
• Provided by Duke University Libraries
• More than 30,000 digitized images, with search/browse capability
• Most images are of outdoor signs from between 1930s and 1980s
• Advanced interface allows you to search by company, product and date

Flickr has had an iPhone app for more than two years.

The new Android app appears to offer several features not available on the iPhone version — including filters to help edit photos before publishing, and additional sharing options. The Android app has been described as taking “a few cues from Instagram,” which is also expected to launch its first Android app soon.

Flickr’s Android app is currently available is close to three dozen countries, which are listed on Flickr’s help pages.

Flickr Photo Sessions

Flickr also announced a new feature called Photo Sessions that lets multiple users browse the same photos simultaneously. Think of it, perhaps, as a modern version of sitting around looking at vacation slides together.

Photo sessions can be started from any photostream or photoi set that has sharing options turned on — look for the new “Start a Photo Session” in the Sharing options menu. Up to 10 people can join a photo session, and signed-in users will have access to additional tools including live chat.

The galleries will show images — but not videos — that are shared on Twitter via many of the major photo upload/sharing tools, such as TwitPic, yFrog, Instagram and Twitter itself. (Twitter began accepting direct photo uploads earlier this month.)

If your account has access to the new feature, which was first spotted by SplatF, you’ll see a “Recent Images” content section on your (or any) Twitter profile page, and it has a “view all” links that leads to the gallery. (See the image above for an example.)

I’ve tried on about 8 different Twitter accounts that I can access, and none have been opted in yet, so here’s another screenshot from Twitter’s new User Galleries help page. This is the “grid” view.

That help page I linked to earlier explains some of the technical aspects of User Galleries. For example, if you do an “old style” retweet of someone else’s photo, that image will show up in your gallery, too. (But if you use the newer Retweet button, it won’t.) It also mentions that User Galleries will not include tweets with video links, and that galleries will be limited to the 100 most recent images associated with a Twitter account.

That limit is disappointing, but User Galleries on the whole should still improve photo search and discovery on Twitter. No longer will you need to scan through someone’s recent tweet history to find a certain image; it’ll be right there in the gallery … as long as it’s one of the most recent 100 images. What would be really great is if Twitter added “Tweets with Images” as an option on the advanced search page.

Twitter says User Galleries should be rolled out “soon” for all users, though a spokesperson declined to be more specific.

The news comes at the same time that Twitter has begun accepting direct photo uploads via the Twitter.com interface. As Mike Cane pointed out, some Twitter users are now seeing a pop-up window on their Twitter home page that introduces the new feature. Here’s how it looks for me:

The “Learn More” link leads to Twitter Help Center page that tells more about the company’s plans for user media galleries:

Are you going to have galleries of my images?

Not at first. But in the coming weeks, we’ll add user media galleries, which will let you see the images a user has shared on Twitter.

When you do have galleries, will they only include images uploaded to Twitter or will other services be included? If so, which ones?

User galleries will include images a user has shared on Twitter, including those uploaded via other services, such as Twitpic, yfrog, and Instagram.

Will all images appear in search?

Unless you have a protected account, there is always a chance that your image will appear in search results.

If I have a protected account, will my images show up in search?

If you have a protected account, your images should never show up in search results.

After being uploaded, photos show up on the pic.twitter.com subdomain and include a “powered by Photobucket” message when embedded in the tweet. Photobucket is hosting the images for Twitter.

The photo upload feature is rolling out to all Twitter users over the next few weeks, according to that Twitter help page I mentioned earlier. The user media galleries are said to be on the way “in the coming weeks.”

When the galleries launch, it should make the experience of searching for images on Twitter a lot easier — at least your own images, if not those of other users, too. Personally speaking, I’ve been inconsistent in using the various third party photo services that connect to Twitter clients. On my laptop, I think I have Tweetdeck set to use Yfrog.com — but on my main home computer, I use twitpic.com. In other scenarios, I’ve uploaded photos to Mobypicture.com, too. Finding my own old images isn’t easy. I’m hoping that the user galleries solves that problem.

Search By Image isn’t the first start-with-an-image search engine, and isn’t even Google’s first version of this kind of search tool. (TinEye has offered reverse image search since May 2008, and Google Goggles was Google’s first search-by-image tool back in 2009.) But Google is the big and new kid on the block, so we’ve taken an in-depth look at how Search By Image works — including when it’s at its best and worst.

How Google Search By Image Works

Search By Image is available now at images.google.com or via the “Images” tab in the left-side menu on Google.com. You should see a small camera icon on the far right side of the search bar.

There are several ways to access it:

• Drag and drop an image on the search bar
• Click the camera icon to upload an image from your computer
• Paste the URL of a photo on the web into the search bar
• Use the Chrome or Firefox extensions that add a search option to your computer’s contextual menu (right click)

After you supply a photo, Google goes to work. The company’s blog post explains that Google analyzes the image, creating a mathematical model based on shapes, lines, proportions, colors and other elements. It then matches the model against images already in Google’s index. Google then does page analysis to take a text-based guess at what the image is, which is part of the process of identifying the image and returning similar results.

Search By Image looks for similar content on the web, so unique or never-before-seen images won’t work well.

No Facial Recognition

One thing that Google emphasized Tuesday is that Search By Image does not use facial recognition. Although Google’s Picasa photo service does facial recognition and others like Exalead do, too, it’s become a hot-button issue on the privacy front. Facebook’s recent announcement that it would use facial recognition to identify friends in newly uploaded photos is the subject of government investigations, and Google has gone to great lengths to deny any plans of using the technology.

So, when you upload a mug shot, Google’s Search By Image results are interesting:

When I upload a photo of myself, Google is able to find web pages with the same image (1), even some that are cropped down the middle. But without using facial recognition, Google only shows similar images (2) that have a similar combination of shape, proportion and colors to my original. (Should I be bothered that a stuffed monkey shows up on row two as visually similar to me? Thanks for nothing, Google.)

By the way, the filename doesn’t appear to matter when you upload an image. I uploaded that mugshot of myself as yDSC_6801.jpg and as matt-mcgee.jpg, and both searches returned the exact same results.

But the browser you use might make a difference. The screenshot above is from Firefox — for some reason, the “visually similar images” returned were slightly different when I uploaded the same mugshot in Safari. Have a look:

See also our follow-up story,Disturbing Michelle Obama Image Makes A Case For Facial Recognition In Google’s New Image Search.

Search By Image: The Hits & Misses

If there’s no facial recognition, identifying people may not be the most recommended way to use Search By Image. So, how is this new feature supposed to be used? In the intro video, Google suggests that it’s for identifying “places, art and even mysterious creatures.”

So, let’s try a few sample images and see how well Google does, shall we?

Identifying Places

Death Valley, California, is one of my favorite places on Earth. (You have to visit it if you’ve never been there.) Zabriskie Point is one of the most well-known and photographed spots in Death Valley. I expected Search By Image to recognize one of my photos of it, and Google didn’t disappoint.

I thought that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland might be a little harder to match, but Search By Image nailed it.

So, let’s make this more difficult. Another favorite place is the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. You’ve probably seen it from the outside — it has a half-dome above the entryway that almost looks like a church building. When I visited there last summer, I took a photo looking up at the inside of the half-dome. Search By Image was a complete miss on this one.

Notice the text above my uploaded photo? It’s asking me to help by providing a description. When I add “football hall of fame” to the search box and try again, Search By Image does better. It finds the official website and the (obligatory) Wikipedia page, and also locates a couple similar images (one of which is my photo uploaded to Flickr a year ago).

Still, that seems like “cheating” when you have to add some text to get the image matching correct, doesn’t it? Let’s try a couple other kinds of images.

Identifying Flowers

I have a thing for flower photos. Problem is, I can’t identify about 90% of what I shoot. Like this yellow flower that I’m sure everyone reading this can identify … but can Google?

Nope. I’m not the only one who doesn’t know what it is. (If you know, leave me a comment, please?)

Another miss: I was surprised to see that Search By Image couldn’t identify this photo of a sunflower.

Search By Image got the color right, and recognized the circular shape inside the photo. But I’m guessing the original photo was too macro to identify as a sunflower; something showing the entire flower might’ve worked better. (But I don’t have any such photos.)

Two Final Challenges

I grabbed two images from my collection that I thought would be real challenges for Search By Image. The first is a photo I took at Disney’s California Adventure — it’s Roz, the hysterical character from Monsters Inc. She’s the very definition of a “mysterious creature,” which is how Google suggests I use Search By Image! Sure, I know there’s no facial recognition, but in her case … might that actually help? Not really.

Apologies to all of the wrestlers and everyone else that was identified as “visually similar” to Roz. But that’s Google, not me. You can reach them at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043.

My last image is a fairly nondescript photo of the Seattle skyline that I took from atop the Space Needle. Since the very distinctive and oft-photographed Space Needle wasn’t in the photo, I expected this might be tough to distinguish from any other city skyline. Boy, was I wrong.

That’s pretty impressive to me: Best guess for this image: seattle skyline? Yep. Exactly. Well played, Search By Image. I’m guessing it helps that a lot of people have taken similar images from atop the Space Needle.

What About TinEye?

TinEye has been offering similar image search capabilities for a couple years and boasts that it has an index of about two billion photos right now. One big difference is that TinEye doesn’t provide text or search results that tell you what you’re looking at; it only returns similar images.

But how well does it do that compared to Google?

I uploaded each of the same images into TinEye to see how well it did and here — minus what would be an overload of screenshots — are the results:

• Matt McGee mugshot – TinEye correctly identified me by name and displayed several exact matching images
• Zabriskie Point – correctly returned a set of matching images
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum – TinEye couldn’t find any similar/matching images
• Pro Football Hall of Fame interior – no similar/matching images
• mystery yellow flower – no similar/matching images
• sunflower macro – no similar/matching images
• Roz – no similar/matching images
• Seattle skyline – correctly identified and displayed similar/matching images

Final Thoughts

Both Google’s Search By Image and TinEye performed very similarly with the images that I uploaded from my collection: They did very well for obvious landmarks and things that are commonly photographed and found online, and not very well for other types of images. The Rock Hall building is the only image that Google identified and TinEye didn’t.

But my sample was extremely limited and designed just to get a general sense of how Google’s new feature works, and how it compares to one that’s been available for years now. To get a more accurate sense of the two, you’d need to do probably dozens of more uploads and more detailed testing on whether things like image size matter (my colleague Gary Price thinks it does, based on some of his own tests with Search By Image).

For me, the final verdict is this: If you need to know what an image is and plan to use Google’s Search By Image or TinEye, you better hope there are already a lot of similar images online and, in Google’s case, a lot of web pages (preferably one from Wikipedia) that describe the image.

Postscript: See our follow-up post, Disturbing Michelle Obama Image Makes A Case For Facial Recognition In Google’s New Image Search.

It’s been on my to do list to write about this issue for several weeks. It came up on the Read 2.0 mailing list that I’m part of back in March, about who has the right to grant permission when a photo is tweeted through one of the many sharing services out there.

I may come back and do a more formal look with interviews with the sharing services and Twitter down the line. But given today’s Space Shuttle shot (the awesome picture on the right) and photographer Stefanie Gordon having tweeted about ABC News using it without credit, I thought I’d pull together some of what I posted earlier to the Read 2.0 list and expand a bit.

The Haiti Photos

You might recall hearing about how professional photographer Daniel Morel took pictures from Haiti after the earthquake, tweeted them, then found that AFP (a news wire service) claimed rights to the photos and sold them to others.

What happened, to my understanding, is that after the pictures were tweeted, another person apparently copied them, then AFP copied the copies and put them out on its wire service without permission of either the photographer or the person who copied them. The images, in turn, ended up with Getty for others to license.

The case went to court and still seems to be on going, last I looked. Among other things, AFP seems to have argued when the photographer uploading the photos to the internet via Twitter, various license agreements with Twitter gave the AFP the right to use the images. Twitter, to my understanding, has disagreed with this.

For more about the case, I recommend these two articles:

• Morel Clears First Hurdle in Infringement Lawsuit for Tweeted Photos
• Daniel Morel reacts to World Press Photo wins

Who Has Charlie Sheen’s Permission?

I think most reasonable people would find it kind of insane that the AFP might think it could just take a picture that was posted online and license it out as its own. And yet, I bring you Charlie Sheen:

That’s a rather iconic photo that Sheen put out soon after he started tweeting. It currently has nearly 2 million views. Have I violated any rights by reproducing it above? Who knows?

When the picture first went up, it was arguably news itself, and perhaps fair game to reproduce as an online news event. Certainly plenty of news sites out there used this photo, I recall. I doubt many got explicit permission. Nor do I suspect Sheen’s top priority was getting back to the requests he did receive.

As for the picture itself, there’s nothing that gives guidance about how it can be used. There’s no “don’t use this” or “use with a link back” nor a Creative Commons license. Nothing.

Given that Sheen published this to the world, it’s reasonable to assume he’d want many people to see it. I’d be surprised if he objected to individual news sites putting it on their sites. He might not mind a wire service distributing it. But someone taking it and selling the rights to it? I suspect that Sheen wouldn’t find that to be “winning” at all.

Twitpic Claims The Right?

If you go way down to the bottom of the page, where the picture is hosted at the Twitpic service, there’s an “All Rights Reserved” notice. That’s so far removed from the photo that there’s an argument that Twitpic reserves the rights to the hosting page itself but not necessarily to the photo on it. But what if Twitpic does claim rights to the image?

Actually, it does — some. But Twitpic posted recently to clarify that it wasn’t trying to take ownership of photos. From the Twitpic post:

You the user retain all copyrights to your photos and videos, it’s your content. Our terms state by uploading content to Twitpic you allow us to distribute that content on twitpic.com and our affiliated partners. This is standard among most user-generated content sites (including Twitter). If you delete a photo or video from Twitpic, that content is no longer viewable.

As we’ve grown, Twitpic has been a tool for the spread of breaking news and events. Since then we’ve seen this content being taken without permission and misused. We’ve partnered with organizations to help us combat this and to distribute newsworthy content in the appropriate manner. This has been done to protect your content from organizations who have in the past taken content without permission. As recently as last month, a Twitpic user uploaded newsworthy images of an incident on a plane, and many commercial entities took the image from Twitpic and used it without the user’s permission.

At first glance, this seems reasonable. You keep the rights to your photos. Certainly since that you never have to explicitly sign any terms to use Twitpic or some other sharing services like yFrog, that’s not just reasonable but common sense. Tweeting a picture using a client built into your phone, an app that doesn’t prompt you about rights, shouldn’t cause you to lose any rights.

For example, I signed into yFrog on the web for the first time today, apparently, because it welcomed me and asked me to agree to its terms as part of that. Yet, I’ve shared 557 photos to date through the service never having gone to the site nor having read or agreed to its terms, because various Twitter clients just automatically let me do that.

Despite Twitpic’s statement, there’s plenty that’s not clear. How exactly is Twitpic dealing with requests to use my images, should they come in? And do I get paid? Or is it only a sub-group of people? And is the “distribution” rights that Twitpic has claimed including distribution through services that might charge for my images?

Who knows?

In an article about the recent Twitpic terms change, which got attention on Techmeme, some celebrities will apparently be covered through an agreement between the WENN news network and Twitpic. Which ones? Will the pictures be flagged in some way? Again, it’s all unclear.

How About Some Guidance?

In fact, there’s nothing on Twitpic at all about the correct way to use images or how to deal with permissions. If you hit the help area, there’s no guidance. If you search for permissions information, you get zero answers:

Do a search for “permissions” or “copyright,” and it’s the same situation. Do a similar search at yFrog, and it’s the same. Anyone coming across these photos are left guessing about how to use them, how to contact people or what to do.

At least yFrog allows for picture embedding. In that case, a site can draw the image from the source site and technically not copy it. But this doesn’t help for offline publications. Nor as a user, can I turn this option off, if I want.

You might think that Flickr, a long-established photo sharing site, has a solution with its Creative Commons licensing approach. You’d be wrong.

Flickr’s Big Fail On Creative Common’s Attribution Guidelines is my post from two years ago about how even when a CC license is indicated, it’s still a nightmare to know exactly how to use those images. That’s still the case today, to my knowledge.

What’s really needed is a way for people to easily flag permissions information with their photos. Perhaps by default, all photos can be used online with a link back to the photo hosting site. But maybe people can alter this to allow for other options, such as paid use by news organizations, or to provide contact details or other permissions information.

Lessons From The Hudson Miracle Landing

Remember this image (used below, with permission) of the US Airways jet landing on the Hudson River in January 2009:

Incredible, right? I saw it everywhere, online and in print. I always wondered if the person who snapped it, Janis Krums, earned anything from it.

Krums wrote about what happened with the photo on his blog last year. He doesn’t say if he ever earned anything from the photo, but he does say that major media outlets used it without paying and without permission.

AP didn’t buy the rights but apparently used it, he wrote. CNN and Fox also did the same. But for whatever financial loss he suffered, Krums was pretty relaxed about it, saying:

When I took the photo my priority was rescuing the passengers of the plane and not selling the rights to one of the news organizations.

Even if he wasn’t worried about the passengers, when do you ever see tweeted pictures with copyright statements. No one does this. Heck, there’s not room in the tweets to insert such things.

Krums, by the way, offered Gordon some advice on her picture via Twitter:

@Stefmara Congrats, those are some great shots. Enjoy the twitter fame, it’s a lot of fun! Make sure you copyright the photos. ;-)

Actually, I’m pretty sure under US law (and in many other countries), Gordon already has copyright to the picture. Registering it just gives her more potential damages, should she file a copyright claim.

How Are Permissions Still Such A Mess?

It’s pretty sad that more than a year after making writing his post, this recommendation Krums has for photo sharing services doesn’t seem to have changed:

One thing that I would like to see is the protection of photos in services like TwitPic, YFrog, TweetPhoto, and others. If they implement some type of distribution avenue it could make sense in events of significance. News organization would know where to look for their info and the photographers would be compensated for their material.

Yes, that would be nice. I agree. I’d dearly like to see the picture sharing services get it together to allow those using them better options to indicate how a picture can be licensed or used. Otherwise, rights will just continue to get trampled on.

See Also:

• An Illustrated Guide To Searching For Shared, Tweeted & “Realtime” Images

I’ve used realtime search tools often, in order to see if people are tweeting and sharing images from news events, such as when the tsunami hit Crescent City. At times, they can provide a faster way to see images before news outlets themselves.

Nachofoto

Nachofoto launched in April 2010 but closed a few months ago to rework the site. Now it’s back and is completely focused on providing fresh images from across the web. It aims to be the primary destination for anyone seeking photos being shared through realtime services, be that via Twitter, blog posts or as part of new web pages.

The site’s home page offers a number of suggested queries that are supposed to reflect news topics that also have many images being shared:

“Aflac Duck” is among the Hot Topics that are trending? Really? Yes. If you drill in by clicking on that link, you get images plus a timeline that shows a recent spike:

Click on the tall bar at the end, and you can drill in more:

Selecting an actual photo brings you to the site with the image –  in the case of CBS, a story about how comedian Gilbert Gottfried, the voice of Aflac’s duck, was fired after making jokes about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Oddly, the picture in the story doesn’t match the picture the Nachofoto showed — but there is a matching photo that is hosted on CBS, so it might have been changed after the initial publication.

Searching For Realtime Images With Nachofoto

How well does Nachofoto work if you’re after a particular image? I haven’t done any large scale testing, but I still like the options that Topsy offers better. More on that further in the story. First, let’s do search at Nachofoto.

While Japan is in the news right now, the image stream is pretty polluted by pictures people are taking of TV images, pictures shared from past earthquakes and more. There are ways to address this, but I thought a search for Bahrain might be more instructive, where protests are happening, resulting in a government crackdown.

With Nachofoto, I can do search for bahrain and get back a timeline view:

What I immediately dislike is that most of the images tend to be from media sources, while I personally often want to use realtime image search to see what citizen journalists are recording. Ideally, I’d like an option to restrict my search to one of the main realtime photo sharing sites or by date range.

Searching At Topsy

I love how Topsy makes realtime image searching easy. From the Topsy photos area, just enter your search, in this case, for bahrain:

The arrows show how you can toggle to see the most recent results first or by other time ranges, such as over the past hour. I’ve found having these time options incredibly useful, when I’m seeking the most recent images.

The images also don’t all seem to be from media outlets. However, it can still be difficult to tell if images are coming directly from those tweeting them. I usually try to hunt back to the originating Twitter account and see if there’s a location being associated with someone’s tweets or other clues, such as if they’ve tweeted additional photos, to better tell.

Using Google Realtime Search

Over at Google, the company’s Google Realtime Search service allows you search through recently shared material and narrow down to those containing images:

You just have to make sure you click on the “Updates with images” option as I’ve pointed to in the screenshot above.

Unfortunately, the display of images isn’t as nice or as compact with Topsy, and using the “Timeline” feature in the top right corner isn’t as easy, to me, as Topsy’s hour / day / week / month buttons.

Searching By Location With Google

Google, however, has a great trick that neither Nachofoto or Topsy can do — it can find pictures based on location. Imagine you want pictures about Bahrain from people actually in Bahrain. This is where search by location can help:

Over on the left, I’ve entered “Bahrain” as a location. That causes Google to only show tweets that come from Bahrain and also which have images.

Searching By Location With Twitter

There are two downsides to searching by location for images at Google. First, some people might be sharing images from Bahrain but not reporting a location with those images. If you filter by location, you won’t see any of those non-location tagged images. There’s no easy solution to that.

The second issue is that some might be sharing images from Bahrain but not using that word (or that word in English). Google Realtime Search doesn’t allow you to do a “blank” search for anything by location. Twitter Search, however, does. Using its advanced search page, you can enter a location:

Then you get back tweets that come only from Bahrain:

Sadly, there’s no option to narrow these tweets down to those containing images. Instead, you have to search for words that are associated with images. For example, consider this:

In the search above, I’ve told Twitter to search for tweets that are within 15 miles of Bahrain (it probably uses a radius out of the center of the country for this) and which have the word “twitpic” in them — which is part of the URL used by the popular Twitpic sharing service.

Notice especially the third tweet. It says nothing about “Bahrain” in it — but by using location plus “twitpic,” I was able to turn it up.

Easier Picture Previewing On Twitter

Unfortunately, Twitter Search doesn’t make it easy to see the images, compared to the way that searching on Twitter itself does. To better understand the difference between searching using Twitter Search versus Twitter.com, see my previous post: The New Twitter & Search, An Illustrated Guide.

One solution is to do a search on Twitter Search, such as I did above, and then copy and paste the search terms into Twitter, like this:

In the example above, I pasted this:

near:bahrain within:15mi twitpic

Into the search box at Twitter.com. When the results appeared, I could then easily click on them and make the picture appear on the right.

Ideally, Twitter would make Twitter Search work the same way. Until then — or if it never happens — you can copy-and-paste or learn some of the advanced search commands for Twitter Search and use them directly at Twitter.com.

Other Real-Time Image Search Engines

Beyond the services above, there are a few other real-time image search engines you might want to check out.

Twitcaps: Search across multiple sharing services using keywords, over the past day. You can filter by language or by a particular service. Narrowing by location is offered by hard to use. You can’t do a “blank” search by location.

PicFog: Promises to let you search by keyword and narrow by location across various sharing services, but its inability to find anything for a search on “bahrain” made me sadly doubt it’s that helpful in general.

Roooby: Another search engine that lets you search across several photo sharing sites. There’s no way to narrow by location.

Photo Sharing Sites

You can, of course, try searching at some of the popular photo sharing sites used by those on Twitter. Below are some of the more popular ones and the searching options they offer.

I’ve listed them in the order I see them suggested in both the Twitter iPhone and iPad apps, which is one indication of how popular they are (those at the top are likely used more). I also included Instagram at the end, as I know it’s another popular sharing tool.

TwitPic: Search by keyword, sort results by most recent, popular or “mixed.”

yFrog: Search by keyword, results sorted by date, by default. You can also sort by most popular and narrow to popularity over the past hour, day or month.

Plixi: Search by keyword, results sorted by date, by default. There’s an option to see “Most Viewed” pictures, and this seems to be most viewed over the past week.

Mobypicture: Search by keyword, plus through advanced search, the ability to do a “blank” search by country or location, with sorting by date, relevance or views. A pretty impressive range of options.

Twitgoo: Search by keyword, get results sorted apparently by most recent first.

Posterous: If it offers search, this isn’t available for non-logged in users.

img.ly: It appears to offer no search feature.

Instagram: It appears to offer no search feature. You can’t even browse pictures from the home page. Oddly makes me feel bad for even trying to view it on the web. Maybe that big iTunes App Store button gives me that “get off my lawn” feeling.

Where’s Flickr? While it’s a great photo sharing site, I haven’t personally found or seen that it has gained much traction as a place where people try to share images within seconds after taking them.

All the best with your real-time image searching!

The company has added a “stock photo” tab on its search results page, so a keyword search for office furniture and a click on that tab brings up results like this.

But it’s not just about keyword search. With Gazopa, you have two other search options: upload an image or draw an image. In either case, Gazopa can now search for stock photos based on those prompts, too.

At the moment, the stock photos are all coming from Shutterstock, but Gazopa says it will add new sources to its database soon.

The image search engine has launched a couple other interesting projects within the past year: GazoPa Style is an image search engine dedicated to fashion products that also allows you to upload photos and search for similar items, and GazoPa Answers is a Q&A site based on images. (Think “What kind of bird is this?” and questions like that.)

Yahoo Product Chief Blake Irving just tweeted a ringing endorsement of Flickr, the company’s photo sharing site/community.

Q. Is Yahoo! committed to Flickr? A. Hell yes we are! We love this product and team; on strategy and profitable.

The tweet is no doubt a response to questions earlier this week about Flickr’s profitability and the possibility that Yahoo might shutter it (as other Yahoo properties apparently will be shuttered).

Long-time Flickr user Thomas Hawk took a stab yesterday at estimating how much money Flickr brings in for Yahoo, and after using what I’d call some questionable numbers, came up with about $50 million per year — small change for a company of Yahoo’s size, especially considering the costs of running a website with more than 5 billion photos. ReadWriteWeb followed Hawk’s article with one of its own that asked if Flickr might someday land on Yahoo’s chopping block.

Cal Henderson, former Director of Engineering at Flickr, responded in the comments on ReadWriteWeb that Hawk’s calculations “are deeply flawed,” and pointed out that Flickr gets a substantial portion of its revenue not from selling Pro accounts, but from ads and other partnerships.

Between Henderson’s refuting of the post that started the discussion, and Irving’s tweet this afternoon, it would seem that Flickr users can breathe easy for the time being.

Actually, you have to specifically request to include images with your results. After doing a search for “lunch” and clicking to see Updates from the left options menu, you then have to click the new “Updates with images” to see results like this.

Note that the focus here is still on the update; this is not a real-time image search tool. If you’re looking for that, here are several options:

• TwitCaps.com
• PicFog
• nachofoto
• Topsy photo search
• roooby

Photo upload services such as TwitPic.com, yfrog.com and others also serve as real-time image search engines to some degree, but those are limited to searching only the photos uploaded on their own platforms.