In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration publishes detailed guidelines for the design of pills, with the goal of reducing drug misidentification. 👆🏻🔎 Who decides the pill colors and shapes? Explore a zoomable quilt of these pill images by clicking on the image above. You can view my slides that I made a few years back for a NICAR talk that used Pillbox as an example here. I found Color Thief very helpful for this.

Using some command line graphics (ImageMagick) I replaced the grey background from each photo with a tinted version of the dominant color, then assembled them into a quilt. Given the availability of information from other NLM resources, we do not currently plan to reinstate Pillbox.'įor this post, I went through and curated a collection of 1,500 of the more interesting looking pills from the database, and processed them to present them in a more interesting way. DailyMed is a highly used drug information resource that contains drug labeling information as supplied by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Additionally, much of the information provided in Pillbox was duplicative of NLM’s DailyMed. I reached out to the National Library of Medicine about why Pillbox was shut down, and I received this response, attributed to 'the Pillbox team': 'Pillbox initially provided pill image data from a variety of data sources, however providers discontinued submitting content over the last several years, leaving pill information static and increasingly out of date. The database appeared to be continually updated during the lifespan of the project. The photos and data are still available “to support research, development, and education”. The project launched in 2009 but was officially retired on January 29, 2021. “This system is designed for use by emergency physicians, first responders, other health care providers, Poison Control Center staff, and concerned citizens” read a press release from the project’s beta launch in 2009.Īn archived version of the website says the dataset “.contains images which were either submitted by pharmaceutical companies to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as part of the drug label submission process or created through pill photography programs at the National Library of Medicine and the Department of Veterans Affairs.” When was this collected? The website described the project as “.one of the largest free databases of prescription and over-the-counter drug information and images, combining data from pharmaceutical companies, Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, and Department of Veterans Affairs.” Why was this data collected?Īccording to the site, the purpose of the database and the accompanying website was to provide a tool to help identify unknown pills based on their shape, color, marking and other attributes. Most of the pill information comes from the Food and Drug Administration’s drug labels database.Įach pill is photographed in high resolution against a uniform gray background, along with rulers to show the dimensions of each pill.

The database includes each pill’s shape (“CAPSULE”, “HEXAGON”, “DIAMOND”,”OVAL”, etc.), color, imprint (the markings on the pill), size of the pill, active ingredients, prescription name, medicine name and manufacturer. market, along with an accompanying database containing 83,925 rows of detailed information on the medication contained in each pill. What is it?Ī dataset containing 8,693 high resolution photographs of pills marketed in the U.S. 5 min read A sample photo from the NIH Pillbox database.

Pill look up by picture