This Image Search Finds Photos Using Your Bad Drawings

Unless you have a drawing tablet, you’re probably not that great at freehand drawing on a computer. But that’s OK because now you can harness the power of your “art” to find better images for you.

Splash is a new experimental project from photo sharing website 500px, and the setup is simple: Make a basic drawing, and see what sorts of similar images you can find that have been uploaded by 500px users. We tried it with the Nerdist logo (above) before realizing that there probably aren’t too many photos of that on 500px, which seems to be used mainly by photographers and artists.

So, to really test the service, we replicated their sunset example and it worked pretty well. We were met with a wall of photos that were very similar in terms of color and composition:

You can search in five different categories: landscapes, people, animals, travel, and city, so while Splash may not be useful in situations like our logo example, it seems to have value. For instance, as Splash points out in one of their examples, painting the image black, placing a white circle somewhere specific in the frame, and searching under “people” looks to be a good way to find portaits that are of a certain composition.

That’s just one example of the potential of Splash, and we’re sure that you can find more. Reddit seems to be having fun with it, and of course, because it’s the internet, somebody found boobs.

Image via 500px