Searching through our old photos could soon be a lot easier thanks to a Newcastle-company which has released a new application for the iPhone.

See-Fish Technology has created 3D image browsing software called See-View that allows users to search through digital collections and quickly locate specific images.

The breakthrough application has been created and developed in association with Middlesbrough-based iPhone game specialists, Fluid Pixel.

See-View has been designed to meet the growth in digital image capture and storage technologies. It maps out collections of images in 3D cubes which users can rotate and zoom in and out using the iPhone’s multi-touch capabilities to find what they want.

Richard Perdik, See-Fish managing director, said: “This is cutting edge technology that makes browsing and finding digital images easier and therefore faster.

“Digital images are usually indexed with text tags or key word searches or can require a manual search through thumbnails to find what you want. This can be hugely time consuming. See-View is a unique visual search application that allows multiple images to be browsed at once.”

The software has been transferred to the iPhone from an image management tool designed for large commercial collections.

Richard added: “See-View was initially designed as a tool for large commercial collections like those owned by galleries where we could present huge numbers of similar images at once in a visual 3D format. It’s the first time a truly 3D format has been available.

“The technology is easily transferable to the consumer market and the iPhone is an ideal platform. We will be issuing an iPad version very soon as well as further releases for the iPhone and other emerging platforms.

“In reality, the technology could ultimately be used anywhere with a digital collection - such as in the health service for retrieving x-ray images or by the security industry. It’s particularly suited to the iPhone with its multi-touch capabilities and has great potential within both the consumer market and commercial world.”

The current release utilises Flickr to view images, and can show up to 500 images on the iPhone screen. Future releases planned under OS4 will work offline and allow access to the local image library on the iPhone.

ENDS