Besides donating money, an example of micro-volunteer work is helping a museum add tag words to the tons of images in its database to help them be searchable for future use.

FORBES: Connect

The product is likely being released so Google can build up a database of images and behaviors, to improve quality.

FORBES: Real-time search, translation, location--everywhere?

In a move both clever and magnanimous, the photo sharing service has figured out how to use their own user database to allow Instagram images to be easily shared on Twitter.

FORBES: Instagram Still Wants To Be Friends With Twitter, Works Around Cut-Off API

It's a tedious job--reading information off scanned-in images of forms then punching it into a database running on a mainframe computer.

FORBES: The human factor

What's more, Nikon's Scene Recognition system draws upon the 420-pixel RGB color 3D Matrix Meter for outstanding exposures under a variety of lighting conditions by integrating a database of tens of thousands of sample images.

ENGADGET: Nikon D3100 gets real, adds 1080p movie mode with continuous autofocus

The Human Connectome Project has therefore developed a database called ConnectomeDB to make sharing of brain images much easier.

BBC: World's most detailed scans will reveal how brain works

Already, the database contains 3m patient records, 35m radiology images, 1.5 gigabytes of diagnoses, 20m order-entries by physicians, and so forth.

ECONOMIST: IT in the health-care industry

The device links to a database of criminal records, iris and face images contributed by local law enforcement that use other BI2 technologies.

WSJ: Police Adopting iPhone-Based Facial-Recognition Device by BI2, Raising Civil-Rights Questions

Searches not only call up websites and images on the same page, but other references, such as Amazon's book search, the Internet Movie Database, and encyclopaedia and dictionary references.

ECONOMIST: Competition still exists on the web