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There’s something magical in the absence of color and there is something unbelievably inspiring in black and white photography. This is the oldest type of photography and still the most inspiring one.

Multicolr is a Flickr-based image search engine that allows you to search by color . To see only black and white photography, all you need is to pick colors from the last row:

Yahoo Image Search : Only few people know that Yahoo can be the best Flickr image search engine you’ve ever tried; mainly, because it has some useful search option that Flickr doesn’t. One of them is actually Black&Whit photos. Both options are accessed via Advanced search; there you can set the image color (black and white) and image source (check Flickr to only include photos from Flickr). Right there, you can also set the license filter to only search for images available for distribution:

Corbisimages is my preferred stock images search engine that both contains a high-quality selection of creative photography and offers a robust search feature with lots of features. I first learned about it from this image search engines overview by Edward Khoo and it has been my personal favorite since then.

Besides setting it to search through black and white images only, you can filter:

• By Type (photography or illustration);
• By distribution rights (royalty-free or “rights managed”);
• By editorial type (current news, documentary, fine art; entertainment):;
• By orientation (horizontal, vertical, panorama);
• By date when the photo was created;
• By photographer.

Bing Image Search : As an avid Googler, I feel bad listing both Yahoo and Bing and not mentioning Google; but here’s the truth: I love Google general search, I hate Google images search. It is both limited and irrelevant. I prefer Bing Image Search engine.

It has plenty of great search options (including a black and white filter):

• Search by size (small, medium, large, wallpaper);
• Search by layout (squire, tall, wide);
• Search by style (photography or illustration);
• Check special people search filters: just faces or including head and shoulders.

Besides, it offers a similar search option if you hover your mouse cursor over an image.

Picsearch is a good alternative image search engine to have by hand. It doesn’t have any extraordinary search options to mention. The only reason I use it from time to time is that it provides totally different search results – something I’d never be able to find using ordinary tools like Google or Yahoo.

“Picsearch uses its own technology to crawl the web and has created a searchable index of images…. Picsearch image search technology has three main features that make it unique. It has a relevancy unrivalled on the web due to its patent-pending indexing algorithms. Also, Picsearch has a family friendliness that allows children to surf in safety as all offensive material is filtered out by our advanced filtering systems. The site is also very user friendly as it’s designed to be simple, fast and accurate.”

Besides searching for black and white photography, the tool offers a few other nifty features like:

• Filtering by size;
• Filtering by type (landscape versus portrait for example);
• Showing search suggestions.

Picsearch indexes the web for images and is probably the best of the lot. The About Page of the site says that its unique search algorithm is due for a patent. The search engine has indexed more than 3,000,000,000 images. You can set a few preferences like an interface language.

Advanced search options give you several image factors like color or black and white, animation or image, portrait or landscape and more importantly the ability to search by image size. You can also use normal search operators to fine-tune your search. The site also comes with a family filter to keep out you-know-those kind of images away from the mix.

There are two things I really liked about the site. Firstly, its speed; and secondly, the Image Directory which is a vast collection of subject specific images. Oh yes, there’s a third thing to like too – it comes with a Firefox extension.

Visit: Picsearch.com

In Greek mythology, it’s a giant with a single eye. As a stock photography search engine, it keeps both eyes on sites like BigStockPhoto, Flickr, Fotolia, Cutcaster, StockVault, Photos.com, ShutterStock and stockx.xchng. The search interface is typically simple and you can search by selecting specific stock photo sites or all of them in one go. A horizontal menu and also a dropdown let you view results by respective site. Clicking on the thumbnail previews takes you to the source where you can see the details attached with the photo.

Cyclo.ps gives the user a Lightbox account where he can save (by clicking the little plus icon), tag, share, and print (only the thumbnail) his selected photos. Visitors can also add comments to your shared images.

Visit: cyclo.ps

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks.

How does TinEye work?

When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in our index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match.

TinEye does not typically find similar images (i.e. a different image with the same subject matter); it finds exact matches including those that have been cropped, edited or resized.

Why use TinEye?

There are many uses for TinEye, but here are a few:

• Find out where an image came from, or get more information about it
• Research or track the appearance of an image online
• Find higher resolution versions of an image
• Locate web pages that make use of an image you have created
• Discover modified or edited versions of an image

Visit:  tineye.com

Kalooga is a image search engine that specializes in finding image galleries rather than individual images, as most search engines do. So when you search for say “auto show”, instead of getting a page with images with auto show photos you get a page with galleries containing auto show photos. This automatically enriches the search results.

“Q: What is the difference between Kalooga Search and the image search offered by for instance Google or Yahoo?
A: Most search engines use the name of an image and/or the words that are used in the neighborhood of the image to assess if an image matches the keywords used in the search. However, the most relevant images often don’t have those keywords in the image name or near the image. Kalooga’s approach is radically different; in order to find images with the correct subject, Kalooga first tries to make sure a web page is focused on a certain image subject. Kalooga analyzes the links and references that exist between web pages in order to find gallery web pages that are focused on a certain subject.”

Kalooga’s current image count at 480 million, though not huge, is impressive.

That’s not all. Kalooga also offers website publishers widgets to display image galleries on their sites.

Visit: Kalooga