FindByColor MVP Launch: Search Imagery by Chromatic Palette

When visual creators—designers, brand strategists, digital artists, or moodboard curators—look for imagery, the brain rarely starts with linguistic tags alone.

You don’t just need a picture of a “chair” or a “forest.” You need a chair bathed in warm, sunlit amber to match a brand palette, or a forest shrouded in deep slate teal to evoke cold solitude.

Traditional image search engines treat visual media like text documents. If you type “emerald green landscape” into a search bar, algorithms look for textual metadata: tags added by photographers, image filenames, or AI captions.

This leads to two common frustrations:

  1. False Positives: An image tagged “green” might be 90% white studio background with a tiny green succulent on the table.
  2. Missing Treasures: An exquisite photograph or historical painting whose color mood is predominantly jade green might only be titled “Morning Mist” or “Study in Tempera”, completely lost to color-specific text queries.

Search engines understand what things are, but they rarely understand how things look.

Enter FindByColor

Today we are launching the first MVP of FindByColor.

FindByColor combines text semantics with direct chromatic color filtering. Instead of guessing how an author tagged an image, you pick a color hue directly, and FindByColor filters results whose dominant visual palette matches your intent.

The MVP indexes two distinct creative domains:

  • Unsplash: Modern, high-resolution editorial, architectural, and commercial photography.
  • The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met): Over 5,000 years of human creative expression from The Met’s Open Access CC0 collection—oil paintings, classical sculptures, textiles, and artifacts.

Whether you want contemporary minimalist architecture in burnt orange or a 17th-century Dutch still life in rich indigo, you can isolate by color in a single click.

Built with Apple iOS 27 Liquid Glass

Visual tools should feel visual. FindByColor is built with Svelte 5 and strictly styled using the Apple iOS 27 Design System:

  • Liquid Glass Materials: Translucent surfaces with realistic specular highlights and darkened borders.
  • Chromatic Pill Controls: Segmented color filters that clearly indicate the active palette without visual clutter.
  • Photo-First Layout: iOS Photos-style clean grid presentation with zero intrusive banners or unnecessary UI noise.
  • Native Sheet Dialogs: High-resolution image previews, full photographer attribution compliance, and direct links to source collections.

Try the Live MVP

The MVP is live today:

Try running a search for your current favorite color and see what emerges.