Our Clients

Idée develops visual search and image identification technologies. First in the world to release an image tracking service for both print publications and the web, Idée has been recognized as an industry leader in image tracking.


Case Studies

Digg

Digg LogoIdée Inc. licenses its Image Identification Technology to Digg to power its image-dedicated section, and ensure that duplicate images are not submitted by Digg users. Read more »

Adobe Systems Inc.

Adobe Photoshop Elements

Idée Inc. licenses its visual search technology to Adobe Systems Inc. to power the 'Find by Visual Similarity' function in Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 6.0. Adobe Photoshop Elements is a complete, all-in-one solution for digital photography featuring:

  • Flexible organization options
  • Advanced sharing capabilities
  • Powerful editing tools and features

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 combines power and simplicity to help you do it all: edit and enhance your photos, catalog and search them, and show off your creativity in new ways. Read more »

Masterfile Corporation

Masterfile Corporation licenses Piximilar, Idée’s visual search technology. Piximilar’s advanced visual search software powers the 'SimSearch™' function on the Masterfile stock photography website. Read more »

Other Case Studies


Testimonials

AFP logo“Idée’s image monitoring service for print and web is an outstanding technological breakthrough. We expect Idée’s service will enable us to keep track of all our images since their technology scales to deal with many millions of images. We are pleased to be working with Idée, one of the pioneers in the image monitoring industry.”
Michel Scotto, Director Photo Business Development,
Agence France–Presse (AFP)
EPA logo “We are excited to be working with Idée and using PixID, their image tracking service. PixID’s image identification technology is truly incredible. We provide a list of publications and editorial websites to track and PixID shows us daily where our EPA images have appeared. The image matching accuracy of PixID is astounding - you have to see the reports to believe them! This will streamline our operational billing and increase revenues, as we can now account for all our licensed image usage.”
Rick Wysocki, Director, NA Sales & Marketing,
European Pressphoto Agency
Masterfile “Masterfile has been manually monitoring print media to protect against infringements of our rights–managed image collection since the days of the Gutenberg press [...] Today our people spend less time turning magazine pages and more time turning Idée reports into money.”
Steve Pigeon, President, Masterfile Corporation.
Getty Logo“Idée is an innovative, service-oriented company that is thinking on the leading edge when it comes to visual search and monitoring.”
Linda Ranz, Former Vice–President Marketing
Getty Images
Featureflash “We are extremely pleased with Idée’s PixID print image monitoring service. Prior to using PixID, we manually reviewed all print publications that subscribed to our image service; this was very inefficient for us. The celebrity photography space moves at a tremendous pace and we needed a monitoring solution that could keep up.
Idée’s PixID monitoring service has worked fantastically well for us. It delivers quick and accurate daily results - it’s perfect for our industry! By using PixID we have also increased revenue intake by identifying licensed image usage that previously would been excluded from billing due to manual tracking errors or erroneous attribution. Idée is at the forefront of this space and has helped us tremendously.”
Paul Smith, Featureflash Photo Agency
Limelight Pictures "Any celebrity photographer will benefit tremendously from this service. We have been very impressed with Idee’s PixID service - it finds all of our images in the magazines and newspapers they monitor for us even when they have been modified, which happens very often with celebrity photos. And it’s all very timely - when our images show up in print, we know about it right away and can bill for it."
Jaime Perez, Limelight Pictures, Inc.
Masterfile“The performance and the accuracy of Piximilar enabled us to easily integrate visual search functionality into our website. SimSearch will greatly enhance our critical business initiatives by providing powerful new search tools for our users. Idée has helped us take enormous steps to achieve these objectives. ... Visual search will be an absolute necessity in the future.”
John McDonald, Vice President, Masterfile Corporation
CGIBackgrounds.com“We were amazed at Idée’s ability to find image usage within days even when the images were cropped, obscured and very small. Idée’s PixID reports provide us with image usage data for the internet and print publications, allowing us to focus on providing great imagery to our clients instead of spending time trying to manually monitor our images.”
Bill Messerly, CGIBackgrounds.com
Hemera“All of us in the content market know all too well that if you can't find the image, you can't sell it,” said Kim Dixon, CEO and President of one of Hemera. “We are pleased to have licensed visual search technology from Idée.” In fact Piximilar is working so well to facilitate efficient searches that Kim likes to sing about it. “Found a peanut” is a slow and long song that was popular when I was a young girl,” she jokes. “Today, I sometimes sing 'found an image' to the same tune.”
Kim Dixon, CEO and President, Hemera Technologies
Landor“An image search for a designer is not only a quest for subject content, but also for pattern and color that evokes a mood or visual rhythm. Although thumbnail browsing of image collections allows for effective visual screening of search results, the sheer number of results from keyword searches of huge collections ...can be daunting.”
Chris Orr, Visual Assets Archivist, Landor
Framepool“Creative workers in the film industry often think in images, not in keywords. We wanted to offer them the opportunity to search for the material they need in a visual way...Once users have caught on to the idea of visual search they really loved the explorative potential of this new search.”
Goetz Schmidt-Bossert, COO of Framepool
“First, the maturing PC industry has made it affordable to implement. Second, the technology itself has improved and become easier to use. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is an emerging need for it...the prospect of telling a system to “find a photo like this” is much more appealing than playing keyword-search roulette.”
Patricia Evans The Seybold Report, Volume 1, Number 15
“Consumers are discovering that all those gigabytes of digital pictures and home movies - whether they are stored in personal computers or burned onto CD's and DVD's – are enormously difficult to sort and search through. Digital–camera owners are realizing that technology has not rescued them from the shoebox overflowing with pictures, but simply replaced the shoebox with a virtual one that is similarly overflowing, or at least overwhelming.”
Michel Marriott, The New York Times, February 19, 2004
“After the long and sometimes painful history of visual search and different companies in the last five years one might cautiously predict that the technology provided by Idée might become the industrial standard for the stock photography business, both in Royalty Free and Rights Managed/Protected.”
Andreas Goetze, Phototalk Special Interest Blog, May 26, 2004
“You don't have to be a photo researcher to realize the significance of this application for stock photo agencies, archives, newspapers, or even industries like film and gaming where they need to keep track of huge image pools or video clips. In the stock photo world, besides the human time saved in rooting out duplicate images from photo collections - the technology allows creative departments to track image modifications like cropping and colour changes”.
Sue Bowness, Globe and Mail, December 8, 2003

Partial Client List

Digg Logo
Adobe Systems
Agence France-Presse
Associated Press
Splash News
EPA logo
INF logo
Admedia Photo
buzzfoto
Celebrity Vibe
Capital Pictures
Sportsphoto
Planet Photos
Globe Photos
Limelight Pictures
National Photo Group
PR Photos
Masterfile
Featureflash
Mavrixphoto
Matrixphotos
Jupiter Images
Superstock
ImageDirekt
Retna
Reelhouse
Algoba Systems
CGI Backgrounds
Fotofinder
FramePool
Hemera Images
Illustration Works
IPNStock.com
Ontario Science Centre
Pages Jaunes
Most Wanted Pictures
ISO Images