Deep Review: Super Image Searching

With the release of Leopard, Apple gave us an almost completely redone search engine. We had Spotlight before, but it just didn’t work very well. It gives you many options of what types of files to search for, but no matter what, you must know at least part of the name. Well, the people at Ironic Software have come up with a great new way to search and sort images on the Mac: through colors with Deep.

As said above, Deep allows you to search by colors. This can be really useful if you are looking for all the pictures of your room, because you know the wall color. Instead of making you pick a color out of the blue, Deep shows you a list of colors that your images contain. But they aren’t really specific colors, they are ranges. So, if you know the picture has a dark red in it, click on the icon that includes that color. This may sound really powerful already, but it gets even more powerful. Once you have clicked on a range, you can click on another one to narrow it down even more. When you click on another color, the list of colors and the list of images will then narrow down. There will always be 7 rows of colors, though, that go through the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, violet).

Once you have selected an image, Deep gives you even more options. On the right side of the window you will see another color list, this time for colors in that image. Below the preview of the image you will see a view with all of your images. But when you click on one of the colors in the right, this list will narrow down to only images with that color. Deep can show you similar images with just a few clicks. But you can also have Deep do this for you with its “Genius” functionality. In the toolbar you will see an icon that looks like iTunes’ Genius button. If you press it, Deep will find all images similar to the selected one. It will still do it by color, but it should make it even easier to find similar images.

One gem in Deep that many can easily miss is its image list scroller. You can use a left or right scroller on a mouse to scroll through, but there’s another way — a better way — just click anywhere in the list and flick with your mouse, left or right, and the list will move through the images. Unlike regular scrolling, it will not stop moving until it has reached the end of the list. You can also just hit the Play button to have it go through the list slowly. The only issue is, there is no pause button, so you have to stop it by clicking somewhere on the list. Although it also has some issues (like dragging up or down can resize the list), it is still a very cool way to view a list of images — very iPhone-like.

Although Deep’s main purpose is to allow you to search images through colors, it also includes a few other things. First of all, when any image is selected, you can just hit Enter to enter some tags. This will also make it easier to find images in the future. You can also sort by image type, location and size and shape. You can actually do all of these at once. This means that you can look for a raw image in your Pictures folder that is extra-large, with a dark shade of blue.

Ironic Software’s Deep retails for $34 and you can download a free trial from their site. It solves an issue that many of us have multiple times a day. Although it’s basically a one-trick-pony, it does the job, and does it well.

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