Ginipic: Neat Image Search App For Web And Desktop

Ginipic is a nice desktop application that allows you to crawl a host of photo sharing services as well as your own machine for pictures, making it a close to ideal image search tool. Can’t believe it took me so long to discover it (Orli was quicker than me).

It’s basically a tool that you can dock on your desktop and use whenever you’re in need of imagery (which obviously applies to us here at TechCrunch quite often). Simply select a source (local pictures, Flickr, Photobucket, Google, Bing, etc.) and enter a search term, and the tool returns a nice canvas-view of the results. If you want, you can filter down based on file size, data, width, height, weight etc. until you find what you’re looking for.

When you click through to a result, Ginipic (gotta love that name) shows you a preview of the picture. You can then favorite it, share it on your usual social networks, set it as your desktop background, save it to disk or a built-in lightbox that contains your desired selection of pictures. All your searches are saved so you can go back to your history quite easily, and I completely dig the fact that you can easily drag and drop pictures from results to the desktop or other applications. Only thing missing I can think of is a basic, built-in photo editor that would enable me to crop and resize images without leaving the app. Otherwise, it’s all good.

You wouldn’t tell from the design and smoothness of the feature-packed application, but it’s the work of a startup that completely bootstrapped the whole thing. The Israeli company, currently only 3 employees strong, did inform me that they’re currently initiating talks with potential investors and hope to raise some seed funding soon. CEO Lior Weinstein tells me there’s a revenue stream they can tap into (besides offering a paid ‘pro’ version): some parties have already approached the young startup to see if they could get a company-branded version of its software.

One note regarding software requirements though: Ginipic currently only works on Windows computers with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installed. A Mac version should be available ‘in the near future’.

If you can, try it out and let us know what you think.