I don’t like turning off my PC at night, I don’t like the modern music that kids listen to these days, and I especially don’t like getting pages of duplicate results when I use Google to search for images.
Thankfully, there’s a solution for the last problem: Ginipic is a free desktop image-search application that offers a refined, duplicate-free way to find photos on the Web.
Ginipic really is an answer to the prayers of anyone who frequently shuffles through search engines and photo sharing sites in search of images. The app — which requires .NET Framework 3.5, so get out a board game for the initial install — displays dozens or even hundreds of thumbnails at a time, making it easy to find what you’re looking for without browsing page after page of search results.
You can let Ginipic search anywhere it likes, or you can funnel the search to a specific service, like Google, Flickr, Yahoo, SmugMug, Live Search, or others. As I already mentioned, Ginipic minimizes duplicates, so you don’t have to crawl through 25 instances of the same images, and you can customize searches using the same advanced search features available on each site — so you don’t lose the ability to limit your Flickr searches to Creative Commons photos when you use Ginipic, for example. And when you find what you want, you can drag images out of Ginipic into whatever app you plan to use, in whatever variety of sizes the image is available.
I couldn’t get Ginipic to work on my beta of Windows 7, but it works splendidly in Vista and XP. For a taste of what Ginipic can do, be sure to check out the video.
