XAML Wonderland

You know the drill.  You’re working on a presentation or document and you need a picture.  If you want to search locally you pull up Windows Explorer and enter a search term.  If you are lucky you find the picture you want an paste into your application.  Actually I use Copernic Desktop Search instead of the Windows Explorer, but that is a topic for another day.

What if you’re looking for an image on the web?  There are a lot of sites that contain images that you can use in your application and many search engines that help you find those images.  You may spend a lot of time navigating to the different sites and entering the search terms and still not find what you are looking for.

New Image Search Tool and Integrator

Ginipic claims to offer a better way to find images and use them in your applications. Let’s take a look and see what it can do.

Ginipic is a WPF application that runs locally on your computer, not through a browser. It can be docked to the sides of your window, which makes is simple to copy and paste pictures into your application.

Here you can see it docked next to Live Writer.

When you click on an image in the search results a preview window appears. 

Not only do you get image details like size, title, file type, dimensions, and date taken, you get the author of the image and information about licensing.

If you like the picture, you just drag the image to your app, like I did with this picture of a Red-Billed Hornbill.  It’s just that simple.

You can also grab an link for you website like this;

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2061/2147471224_7da5d33af2_m.jpg

or grab more detailed HTML like this;

<div style=”font-family: verdana; font-size: 14px”>
    <div>
        <img alt=”Red-billed Hornbill” src=”http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2061/2147471224_7da5d33af2_m.jpg” border=”0″/>
      </div>
      <div>
        <small>
            <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/21923086@N05/2147471224/”><strong>Red-billed Hornbill</strong></a> by <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/people/21923086@N05/”><strong>Stephen Oachs</strong></a>
        </small>
      </div>
      <div style=”margin-top: 5px; font-size: 14px”>
          <div style=”float: left; margin-top: 3px”>
            <small>* Found with</small>
          </div>
          <div style=”float: left; margin-left: 5px”>
              <a target=”_blank” href=”http://www.ginipic.com/” linkindex=”124″ set=”yes”>
                <img alt=”Ginipic logo” width=”90px” height=”23px” style=”border: 0px;” src=”http://static.ginipic.com/img/ginipic_logo_small.png”/>
            </a>
          </div>
      </div>
</div>

You can go to the original photo site or set the image as your desktop wallpaper from the Ginipic interface.  If you into the social web you can also send the image to any of these services.

Search

You can search up to ten sites at one time from the Ginipic interface.  It can also search your local drives.

Price

Best of all, this is a free application. It’s found a place on my program list.