Queen rocks Tag Galaxy

I was introduced to a cool Flickr search tool tonight — Tag Galaxy. It searches the metatags of photos posted on Flickr and displays the results in a planetary analogy for an interesting visual index of relevant images. Just for fun, I typed in “Brian May” to see what would happen.

As you can see here, the largest (centre) planet represents all Flickr photos that have “Brian May” as a metatag and the smaller planets are photos with metatags related to “Brian May” in some fashion.

If I click on the BRIANMAY planet, the screen zooms in and the planet is transformed into a cubist-like sphere that pulls images from the Flickr site and posts them on the awaiting sphere planes.

Soon, the entire orb is covered in Brian May-related photos that reside on the Flickr site. At this point, you can click on the globe with the cursor and spin it around at whatever angle you like and see what the full range of photos are for that visual index. You can also click on the next set of results arrow and the orb will be wrapped in a new set of results photos.

I wonder what I’d get if I typed in some Queen-related metatags? Let’s find out . . . 

Unfortunately, a search for “John Deacon” didn’t return results with related metatags . . . just images tagged with “John Deacon,” so it automatically morphed into the photo orb and bypassed the galaxy stage . . .

From the looks of some of the images, though, it’s pulling photos of some Queen cover bands.

What about a tag search for “Queen”? It didn’t produce anything related to the band. This is particularly surprising given the extent of Queen (the band) images found through other search engines.

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