Announcing Colorapi. Search for colors inspiration on Flickr photos.

In early 2007 I launched a Color Scheme Generator that got featured by Andy Clarke and loved by Karina Beattiger among others. Back then I coded the app for fun and as a learning experience. It was based on Akelos and it did some heavy lifting in the background. For every search, it downloaded thumbnails from Flickr, reduced pixel count, analyzed each pixel and normalized the color histogram, then the response was sent back to the client using Ajax. The whole process was really slow and took down my servers as soon as the site gained popularity. Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to optimize it and had to take the application offline.

Two weekends ago I started coding a new version of the color sampling tool using Node.js. Node’s event driven and non-blocking architecture was a perfect fit for an asynchronous application like this. Thumbnail download and color extraction happen all in parallel and the result for each photo is sent to the browser as soon as it is available thanks to WebSockets and socket.io.

Today I’m happy to announce Colorapi. Colorapi allows you to discover color palettes from photos on Flickr. You can sort photos and decide how many colors you want to extract from each photo. You can view colors in full screen mode, navigate with your keyboard and download the swatches in .ase (Adobe Swatch Exchange) format.

Colorapi color palette search results

Full screen color palette

So far I’ve only tested it on Firefox, Chrome and Safari on Mac and iOS. I’ll have to wait until next weekend to make sure it works on IE and improve navigation on the iPad.

I’d appreciate your thoughts on this application and on how to improve it’s usefulness.

Enjoy Colorapi!

EDIT: There is a discussion about Colorapi on Hacker News