I was talking to a North Bristol based client recently who had brought her machine in for a laptop repair and she was moaning that Google’s last revamp of its image search facility had been a retrograde step…..
Most people use Google as their search engine of choice without a seconds thought these days. But how often do you use it for searching images rather than simple text? Google revamped their image search function last year, so let’s take a quick look at it.
If Google is set as your home page, like me, you can easily start an image search by clicking on the image option link located along the top left hand side of the normal Google search page.
You can also get to the image search screen by typing http://images.google.com directly into your browser’s address bar.
Next, undertake a search as you would a normal web search by typing something into the search box. Then click on ‘search images’. Google will respond by displaying a results page composed of nothing but pictures.
No summary information is provided with these displayed images by default i.e. information such as the name of the picture, its resolution or size, or which web site it is associated with.
If you want to see the sizes of the images, you need to click on the ‘Show sizes’ link under the heading Standard View at the bottom left hand side of your screen (you may need to scroll down a bit to locate it). When you click, the resolutions of the pictures are overlayed.
Click on an individual picture and your web browser will display the source website with the thumbnail of the picture overlaid on top. A panel on the right hand side of the screen lists the summary information.
To view the source website either close the thumbnail by clicking on the little cross in the top righthand corner of the overlaid picture or click on the ‘Website for this image’ link on the right hand side of the screen. Otherwise click on your browsers back button to return to the Google results page.
Here you can filter the search results by selecting any of the criteria listed on the left hand side of the screen e.g. size, type or colour. Clicking on the ‘clip art’ option for instance will return a page of clip art images only.
To search for only green pictures, click on the green square icon.
To remove the filter, click on the small blue cross on the top right hand corner of the search page. Easy isn’t it!
Go on, have a play and Google some pictures today!