Blog posts tagged search

Searching the SFO Museum Aviation Collection website by color

The search-by-color functionality works by taking an input color, represented as a hexidecimal string, and then “snapping” it to its nearest match on a fixed palette of colors. The RGB color space contains over 16 million individual colors so searching for exact matches will usually yield too few results to make searching by color useful. By “bucketing” all those millions of colors in to a fixed set of a couple of hundred colors, a “palette”, things start to get interesting.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on June 16, 2025 and tagged collection, search, color, api and webassembly.

Searching Text in Images on the Aviation Collection Website

We want to see what these technologies make possible, though, and a very real and immediate opportunity is the ability to index search terms that the curators and registrars haven’t already included in the titles or descriptions for objects in our collection. For example, this travel bag from Canadian Pacific Airlines, covered in the names of cities the airline traveled to, is not included in the search results for the terms “montreal” or “saskatoon” using the default search functionality but it’s the first result when we also search for the text in images.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on September 14, 2023 and tagged search, swift, collection, roboteyes, grpc and tools.

Geotagging at SFO Museum, Part 4 – Search

But what if you want to center the map on a different place and don’t already know its latitude and longitude coordinates? What if you need to jump around to a bunch of different places all over the world?

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on April 28, 2020 and tagged sfo, collection, geotagging, placeholder and search.