The recently launched Flickr Collection has entered the second phase of its marketing campaign, which Getty Images refers to as the social networking and creative inspiration experience. The Seattle company introduced a Flickr photo-clouds feature, which lets users visually group images.
According to Getty, this offers users a new way to search and display images, while also fostering a creative community on the collection’s Web site. The functionality augments traditional search capabilities.
The new image clouds are searchable in three ways: by username, keyword or cloud topic. Users looking for inspiration around a particular keyword can review all image clouds that contain an image with that keyword or only the clouds that use that keyword in the cloud title.
Getty hopes to help creatives spark new ideas by allowing community members to see how other users envision particular topics or themes. The company also released supporting tools, such as a desktop widget, screensaver and a Facebook app that lets users export and share image clouds on the popular social networking Web site.