Multi-lingual image searching on Flickr

I like to search for images on Flickr, but I’m also lazy. So if I want to search for a photo of a temple I type temple into the search box. That’s usually fine, but suppose I want to search for a particularly striking image. I’m taking a gamble that the best images are tagged in English. If you visit somewhere like the Chiron photopool, you’ll see that often they’re not.

One solution would be to copy and tag any creative commons image in multiple languages. This is a stupid idea. It’s too time-consuming and time-consuming work is what computers were made for.

Using Yahoo!s Pipes tool I can now have searches automatically translated for me. It’s not a perfect solution yet, it’s very messy in that it relies on mixing together RSS feeds. But it does suggest that if there’s a free translation API it could be hooked into the Flickr API to produce a very powerful search tool. Normally automated translation is awful, but this could be one case where word for word machine translation might help.

To see it in action visit: http://pipes.yahoo.com/alun/flickrsearch