
Show HN: Taken Photos – Free Stock Photos Annotated by AI - msamoylov
https://taken.photos/
======
willvarfar
This desperately needs a text search feature!

The first thing I thought of was 'oooh, maybe put a pic on the landing page of
this website I help out with' but I can't search for e.g. 'chess' or whatever
theme I want.

The whole point of the site is to annotate the photos, but then to not make
them searchable by annotation? Shame!

~~~
tristanperry
Agreed and it's nice to hear it's first on the todo list.

Until then, though, just change the word in the tag (with hyphens for multiple
words), e.g.:

[https://taken.photos/tags/chess/](https://taken.photos/tags/chess/)
[https://taken.photos/tags/tabletop-game/](https://taken.photos/tags/tabletop-
game/)

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calibas
Where do the images come from? The "About Us" page says they're all public
domain, but this image has a copyright: [https://taken.photos/photos/pink-
flower-on-plant-3753020/](https://taken.photos/photos/pink-flower-on-
plant-3753020/)

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wahlis
My favourite is "A statue of a cement bench"

~~~
ttmbs
[https://taken.photos/photos/statue-of-cement-
bench-3752798/](https://taken.photos/photos/statue-of-cement-bench-3752798/)

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masukomi
Interesting. You _really_ need some way for folks to suggest improved
captions.

A tree with a mountain in the background.... completely ignoring the house
which is the central focus of the photo.

[https://taken.photos/photos/tree-with-mountain-in-
background...](https://taken.photos/photos/tree-with-mountain-in-
background-3752981/)

or the aforementioned "A cat sitting on top of each other"

I'm thinking this is a great _starting point_ a way to bulk ingest lots of
photos, but as a resource i'm going to loose faith in it every time i see an
obvious AI screw up. Technically yes, they're still useful titles that help
(well, they would help if you had a search which I can only assume you're
planning because otherwise what's the point) but _emotionally_ i'm going to be
"yeah but they're always wrong" (even if it's not true)

~~~
msamoylov
How about "A man and a dog walking on a sandy beach?"
[https://taken.photos/photos/man-dog-walking-on-sandy-
beach-3...](https://taken.photos/photos/man-dog-walking-on-sandy-
beach-3752898/)

This is the state of modern AI. Mostly it's still utter garbage.

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lpellis
What do you use for the AI labelling? Looks pretty accurate, but fun to see
the random mistakes

A zebra standing on top of a building [https://taken.photos/photos/zebra-
standing-on-top-of-buildin...](https://taken.photos/photos/zebra-standing-on-
top-of-building-3752577/)

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neals
"A cat sitting on top of eachother" [https://taken.photos/photos/cat-sitting-
on-top-of-each-other...](https://taken.photos/photos/cat-sitting-on-top-of-
each-other-3752961/)

some of these are comedy gold :)

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d--b
[https://taken.photos/photos/woman-standing-in-front-of-
mirro...](https://taken.photos/photos/woman-standing-in-front-of-mirror-
posing-for-camera-3751760/)

------
mstolpm
Nice work. But I would suggest to add a feature to report wrong tags. Perhaps
that could even lead to optimize the classification AI or you could at least
review the suggestions and delete wrong tags manually?

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joshspankit
Suggestion when adding text search: allow “and” tags, such as “outdoor AND
person” or “people AND group AND smile”

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ethor
Is there anyway to read more about the technical bits regarding how this is
done, i.e. how are the annotations made?

~~~
msamoylov
Sure, why not. I scrape multiple Russian websites with photos and annotate
pics with [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-
service...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-
services/computer-vision/)

Surprisingly MS does much better than Google and their
[https://cloud.google.com/vision/](https://cloud.google.com/vision/)

I tried both and got frustrated with almost random results from Google.

~~~
yorwba
Those platforms you're sourcing the photos from presumably have content
restrictions, which causes the "nude" tag to be dominated by photos without
any humans in them. For example this flame:
[https://taken.photos/photos/2568745/](https://taken.photos/photos/2568745/)

~~~
msamoylov
Well, there was a bug in my data migration/cleanup script for tags. Thanks for
catching.

The 'curated collection' statement means 'there is no adult or NSFW' content.
AI does great job with detecting nudity, and as a pragmatic person I decided
to keep all scraped adult content and have it served at
[https://nudes.best/](https://nudes.best/)

