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The FOTOfinder can be used to search for images using criteria such as orientation, keywords, locations etc.

Launch the FOTOfinder
(opens a new browser window)

Below is some information about how to search using the FOTOfinder.

Locations

At the top of the list is the "Anywhere" location.

Use this if you don't care where the photo was taken, eg. you just want to see photos of lions no matter if they're in Kenya or New Zealand.

Below this are several main locations and, usually, below each main location some indented sub-locations. For example "WA" is a main location.

Select WA and you will get all photos taken in West Australia, north, south, east or west.

Under WA you will see "South", "East" and "North" slightly indented, these are sub-locations.

Selecting "South" will only display photos from the southern section of WA, "North" the northern section etc.

The same principle applies to all other locations.

Categories

At the top of the list are several special categories.

Anything
Use this category when you don't care what the subject is, only the location. For example all photos taken in London.

New photos
Display photos that have been added recently, usually within the last month or so.

Best general/landscapes/nature
Photos I consider to be my best in three areas, nature, people, and general.

Faces in nature
The images in the Faces in Nature series.

Black & White
Pretty self-explanatory really.

Panoramas
This category is for photos created using panorama stitching software.

Computer illustrations
These images are "illustrations", which is to say they are flights of fancy created from my photographs.

Not for sale
There are just a few photos that aren't for sale, mostly because there's a reason I can't produce a high quality print even though the shot looks good on the web.

Wothahellizat
Photos of Australia's largest and weirdest motorhome.

In a similar fashion to the locations list, categories are divided into main categories and sub-categories.

For example, selecting "Wildlife" will display all animals, Kangaroos, Reptiles, Mammals, et al.

But selecting "Kangaroos" will only show Australia's largest hopping marsupial.

Most categories have an "Other" sub-category.

This will show photos that don't belong in any of the other sub-categories.

Keywords/photo number

The keywords are built automatically from the photo's text, such as the title and caption.

The text is converted to lower case then split into separate words, noise words like "and" are removed, as are most verbs, then each word remaining is cleaned of some unimportant bits (like 's on the end) and converted to a "standard" form.

This process eliminates many of the normal spelling errors and differences we have between the various English dialects, such as ize/ise.

What matches?
Just as each photo's keywords are standardised, so are the words you enter in the keywords text box, so you don't have to be too precise with case, extra spaces, punctuation etc.

For example the following will all match "Tolkien's"

tolkeen, tolken, Tolkien, TOLKEIN, tolkein's

Entering any of these words will display the photo "Tolkien's Trees" in the list, and possibly several others.

The process of standardising words does create some weird matches however, for example robert, rabbit and robot all match each other.

This produces a very loose result that returns more photos than an exact match method, but with a small database of this kind that's preferable to missing photos because of a small spelling error.

Multiple keywords
You can enter up to six keywords to limit the search. The keywords will logically AND'd, which is to say that only photos with ALL the entered keywords will be found.

For example night will return many photos, night boat will return much fewer, and night boat paris will only return a single photo.

Noise words are ignored, so night in paris is the same as night paris.

Why do I sometimes get some weird results?
The search uses a fuzzy-logic algorithm to find photos that match the word you typed. Sometimes the logic is a little fuzzier than required but, as I said above, it's better to get more photos than miss some.

For example, you type the word "lion" and, besides photos of Panthera Leo, you also get photos of a flower and a fishing boat.

Maybe, buried in the supporting text in the gallery pages of the two stray photos, was the word "lens" or "line", the fuzzy logic sees both these words as being the same as "lion".

Another example is the word "sheep", it standardises to the same as "ship". Ships are in the same category as boats, so your search will return a lot of photos that have more to do with fishing than sheep.

If you only want photos of our woolly four-legged friends try adding another keyword such as "wool" or "animal". This will remove all boating photos.

Conversely, if you only want ships, try "ship boat" to exclude any sheep photos.

Photo number(s)
If you happen to know the number of a photo or photos you can enter it in this text box. Any amount of numbers can be entered, separated by spaces, for example.

9 182 20000 2134

Internally all numbers a converted to 5 digits so there's no need to type 00009, just 9.

Variations
In some cases there are variations to a photo, for example I often shoot both horizontal and vertical versions. Usually one stands up as the best and that's the one that is featured on this web site.

However, it's common to need a different orientation to fit a particular layout, or a wider version that allows copy to be dropped into the sky etc.

If the shot has such variations, this field will say so. Explanations for the somewhat cryptic variations displayed are as follows.

• similar, there are photos of the same subject that are basically the same but vary in small ways
• composition, basically the same as "similar", the shot is the same but the subject is maybe higher or lower in the frame.
• focus, differentiates two shots that have the same composition but the focus is different, ie. focus on foreground in one shot and background in another.
• vertical, there is a vertical version of this photo.
• horizontal, there is a horizontal version of this photo.
• wider, there is a wider version of this photo with more space around the subject.
• tighter, there is a tighter version of this photo, maybe a full frame of the face rather that head and shoulders
• detail, similar to tighter but more so, a photo of a piece of machinery may have a detail of a single bolt.
• angles, same subject but from the other side, or maybe lower and higher shots.
• diff light, same subject but at a different time of day or with the light changed for some other reason.
• colour, a B&W photo has a colour version.
• b&w, a colour photo has a B&W version.
• large format, this photo has a version shot on large format.
• place, other photos where taken at the same time and place, or the immediate surrounds.
• cropped, the image displayed here has been cropped from the full frame.

When an image has a variation it is available, just not featured on this site. So, for example, you like a certain photo but need a horizontal version, and you can see the word "horizontal" below the thumbnail, email me for details.