Tag Archives: image search

New Creative Commons image search – back to the drawing board I’m afraid

February 10, 2017 Karen Blakeman 1 Comment

Locating images that can be re-used, modified and incorporated into commercial or non-commercial projects is always a hot topic on my search workshops. As soon as we start looking at tools that identify Creative Commons and public domain images the delegates start scribbling. Yes, Google and Bing both have tools that allow you to specify a license when conducting an image search but you still have to double check that the search engine has assigned the correct license to the image. There may be several images on a webpage or blog posting each having a different copyright status and search engines can to get it wrong. Flickr’s search also has an option to filter images by license and there are sites that only have Creative Commons photos, for example Geograph. But the problem is that you may have to trawl through several sites before you find your ideal photo.

Creative Commons has just launched a new image search tool that in theory would save a lot of time and hassle. You can find some background information on the service, which is still in beta, at Announcing the new CC Search, now in Beta. The search screen is at http://ccsearch.creativecommons.org/.

The Creative Commons collections are currently included in the search come from the Rijksmuseum, Flickr, 500px, New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You can search by license type, title, creator, tags and collection.

As well as search there are social features that allow you to add tags and favourites to objects, save searches, and there is a one-click attribution button that provides you with a pre-formatted text for easy attribution. There is also a list creation option. To make use of these functions you need to register, which at present can only be done via email.

I started with a very simple search: cat

Hover over the image and you have options to Save to a list and to favourite it. It will also show you the title of the image and who created it. Click on the image and you are shown further information including tags together with a link that takes you to the original source.

So far, so good although I did think it rather odd that the image should have tags for both norwegian forest cat and nebelung but assumed that perhaps the cat was a cross between the two.

I decided to narrow down the search to norwegian forest cat, and this is where things started to go very wrong. There were a handful of cats but the rest seemed irrelevant. I put the terms inside quotation marks “norwegian forest cat”. It made no difference.

I had a look at one of the non-cat images and the reason it had been picked up was that the creator called themselves Norwegian Forest Cat! So I unticked the options on the search screen for creator and title, leaving just the tags. At least the results were now cats but most did not look anything like norwegians.

I looked at the tags for one of the short haired mogs.

It seems that this is a very special creature. It is both a domestic long haired cat and a domestic short haired cat, a norwegian forest cat and a manx, a european shorthair and an american short hair. The creator of this photo must have had a brainstorm when allocating the tags, or perhaps Flickr’s automatic tagging system had kicked in? It does sometimes come up with truly bizarre tags. I clicked through to Flickr to view the original.

The original tags were very different. The two sets had only cat, pet, and animal in common. I have no idea where the tags on the CC photo page had come from and could not find any information on how they had been assigned. This was repeated with all of the dozen images that I looked at in detail.

I decided to give up on cats and try one of my other test searches: Reading Repair Cafe. I know that there are about 75 images on Flickr that have been placed in the public domain. I know that because I took them. To make it easier on CC Search I choose to search titles and tags, and just the Flickr Collection. The results were total rubbish.

Looking at the details of the photos it became clear that CC Search is carrying out an OR search. Phrase searching did not work and using AND just created a larger collection of irrelevant images. (I confess I gave up after trawling through the first 12 pages). After the cat experience I checked the tags on a few photos but no sign of Reading Repair Cafe anywhere.

A search on Flickr and using the license filter worked a treat:

Google did a pretty good job too but to get perfect results I had to do phrase search. (Note: as this is a regular test search of mine, I signed out of my Google account and went “Incognito” to stop Google personalising the results. )

Bing also did an excellent job at finding the photos.

Admittedly, CC Image Search is a prototype and in beta so one would expect there to be a few glitches. However, glitches seem to be the norm. I ran several more tests and the main stumbling block is that it combines terms using OR. There is no other option or any commands one can use to change that. My second concern is where on earth do the tags on the CC Search photo pages come from? Most of them do not appear on the original source page and many are completely wrong. I’m afraid it is back to the drawing board for CC Search.

Bing, Google, images

Bing adds Creative Commons search to images

July 27, 2013 Karen Blakeman

Bing has added public domain and Creative Commons options to its image search but only if it thinks you are in the US. This is a feature that Google has long offered as part of its image advanced search but Bing have only recently added it as an option. If you are looking for an image to include in a presentation, article or promotional literature you have to make sure that the copyright license allows you to do that. Get it wrong and you could be on the wrong end of a very expensive law suit (Bloggers Beware: You CAN Get Sued For Using Pics on Your Blog http://www.roniloren.com/blog/2012/7/20/bloggers-beware-you-can-get-sued-for-using-pics-on-your-blog.html). Images that are in the public domain give you free rein to do whatever you want with them but it can be difficult to find photos that match your requirements. You may have more luck with Creative Commons images.

Bing image search now has an option to restrict your search to a specific license, but only if you are using the US version of the search engine. For those of us outside of the US we have to change our ‘country/region’. Bing frequently introduces new search options that are only available on the US version. They obviously think that the rest of the world is irrelevant.

On Bing’s home page you should see in the upper right hand corner of the screen a ‘Sign in’ option and a cog wheel. Click on the wheel to go to the settings page where you will see an option to change your location. Click on ‘Change your country/region” and select ‘United States- English’. Then head off to Bing images.

Run your search and running across the top of the results page you should see a menu with ‘License’ at the end of it. Click on this and a drop down menu will appear with options such as ‘Public domain’, ‘Free to share and use’, ‘Free to modify, share and use commercially’.

Select the license you need and only images with that license will be included in the results. In the example below I have run a search on Caversham, which is where I live, and selected the ‘Free to share and use’ license. The results include one of my own Flickr photos of Queen Anne’s school.

I have a major problem with the terminology used by Bing to describe some of the licenses, and it is also a problem with Google. Misunderstanding the terms of the license could land you in serious trouble and both Bing’s and Google’s descriptions can be confusing and misleading. ‘Free to modify, share and use commercially’ is straightforward. You can modify the image, share it and even use it as part of commercial publication, brochure, website or whatever. But what about ‘Free to share and use’? I often run this one past people in my workshops and seminars, many of whom are not familiar with copyright. Usually, their immediate response is that they can share and use it however they want, even commercially. Then there might be a pause and someone will ask “What’s the difference between that license and ‘Free to modify, share and use commercially”. A great deal, and a substantial dent in your finances if someone decides to sue you for copyright infringement, but to most people it is not obvious. It wasn’t obvious to me the first time I saw the options! ‘Free to share and use’ is only allowed for non-commercial purposes. Is it so difficult to add ‘non-commercial’ to the description?

Always click through to the original source of the image. If it is a Flickr photo the copyright license will be clear. My photo of Queen Anne’s school is indeed Creative Commons free to share and use, but non-commercially and with attribution (you are required to credit me as the photographer). You may also find that the license that Bing or Google indicates is associated with an image may not be correct. On many occasions I have identified, via Google, an appropriately licensed image for a presentation or paper only to discover that it was ‘all rights reserved’ and that the Creative Commons license referred to another image on the page. If in doubt, ask. And if you cannot identify who is responsible, or they do not respond to your emails then do not use it.

If you are wondering where Google’s image license options are, they are on the advanced search screen. You first have to run your search in Google images and then click on the cog wheel in the upper right hand area of the results page.

Select ‘Advanced search’ and on the next screen go down to almost the bottom of the page and ‘Usage rights’. Click on the downward pointing arrow next to ‘not filtered by license’ and select the license you require. By the way, ‘not filtered by license’ does not mean public domain – it covers every image that Google has indexed regardless of whether it is all rights reserved or completely free to use.

And finally, if the perfect image for your project is all rights reserved do not despair. Contact the owner of the photo. If it is a worthy project or a local community cause they may give you a free license.

Google, images

And another one bites the dust

June 3, 2013 Karen Blakeman

It looks as though Google has quietly removed yet another search tool from its menus. This time it is “Sites with images”, which used to be under “Search tools”, “All results”. Like translated foreign pages I suspect it has been dropped because of low usage. I used it about once or twice a month, usually to identify a building or a landmark that I had seen whilst out and about and to find further information on the subject. I would put in a description, run the search and then apply sites with images. The results gave the usual extracts from web pages together with thumbnails of the images on those pages. It was very quick and easy to use and more reliable than the two alternative strategies.

The first option is just to run the search in images, but because I’m often looking for something along the lines of ‘hotel between Windsor and Maidenhead Thames’ there can be a significant amount of noise in the results. Also, that approach often pulls up Flickr photos, which can sometimes tell me the name of the place, but does not always provide the more in depth information I require.

The second option is to use Google’s search by image option. This enables you to upload a photo, or point to the URL of an image on the web, and look for similar images. The option can be found by clicking on the camera in the search box on the Google images search page.

You are then given the option to point to the URL of an existing image on the web or upload your own. This is not much help if I haven’t taken a photo of the subject, and if I had a URL I probably would not be trying to identify it. There is also the problem that if Google does not find many exact matches it looks for “visually similar” images that have similar patterns, shapes and combination of colours but which may be of a completely different subject. In the example below I uploaded my own photo and Google has found the exact copy that I had previously uploaded to Flickr. None of the visually similar images are photos of the building I am interested in.

I’m disappointed but not surprised that Google has discontinued sites with images. My money had been on one of the other search tools going before this one. As with the disappearance of translated foreign pages I can live without it, but it means I have to spend more time and effort on finding the information. At this rate there won’t be many search tools left on Google so it makes even more sense to become familiar with the alternatives.

Cue a blatant plug for my forthcoming workshop “Anything but Google”! It is being organised by UKeiG on the 27th June in Newcastle. Further details are on the UKeiG web site at http://www.ukeig.org.uk/trainingevent/anything-google-karen-blakeman

Internet Librarian International, Presentations, Search Engines, Search Strategies, workshops

ILI 2011 web search presentations

October 29, 2011 Karen Blakeman

The presentations I gave at International Librarian International this week in London are now available on my Advanced Search page at http://www.rba.co.uk/as/. They are also available on authorSTREAM and Slideshare.

Searching without Google

Presentation given as part of the main conference on Friday, 28th October 2011

It is also available on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/KarenBlakeman/searching-without-google

Web Search Academy

This was a pre-conference workshop held on Wednesday26th October with myself, Marydee Ojala and Arthur Weiss presenting.

Alternative Search Tools

Please note the content of this presentation is similar to that of my main conference presentation “Searching without Google”.

Also available on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/KarenBlakeman/alternative-search-tools

Visual Search

Looks at image search tools, video search engines and visualisations.

The Slideshare version is available at http://www.slideshare.net/KarenBlakeman/visual-search-9892558

Bing, Google, images

Google Images rolls out (very slowly) Bing-like results

July 24, 2010 Karen Blakeman 4 Comments

Google has rolled out Bing style results for its image search. If you have never used Bing Image search take a look now. Several people in my latest search workshop loved it so much that they included it in their top search tips (http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2010/07/16/top-search-tips-14th-july-2010-workshop/). Bing Images results do not do page by page results: Bing Images does continuous scroll. As you move down through the results more images are loaded, and more, and more. There is no click “next page” to distract you. And now Google has copied the style… sort of.

I have several problems with Google’s new image results layout. The first thing that struck me was that the images are all crammed in side by side to neatly fill the rows. Have the images been cropped to obtain the desired effect or have they been selected by dimensions, rather than relevance, to fill the ‘mosaic’? Bing has four images in each row regardless of their relative dimensions so there is more white space between the images, which is easier on the eye. Google’s display makes me feel as though I’m in a jam-packed standard class commuter train carriage: Bing is the more spacious, relaxed first class.

Neither Google nor Bing display by default image information, but you only need to hover over the image in which you are interested to see further details. The information is almost the same in both but Bing has an additional option to look for more sizes. The size option is great if you want to use an image but do not want to have the trouble of re-scaling it for your particular application. But not all images are available in ‘more sizes’. It depends on whether or not other web pages have reproduced the image with different dimensions. If you own a particular image with strict copyright protection and you know you have only posted a specific size on one page, this can be a useful tool in tracking down copyright violations.

When it comes to scrolling down through your results, Google seems to have lost the plot. Work your way down through the results on Bing and the display smoothly unfolds. Google’s is stop start stop…….start, stop. And it is so sloooooooow. I can almost hear the cog wheels clanking. Another distraction in Google is that batches of images are separated by the text ‘page 2’, ‘page 3’, ‘page 4’ etc. Why? The whole point of continuous scrolling of results is that there are no pages of results.

As a comparison, here are Google’s results for an image search of Blackpool Tower:

Here are Bing’s results:

Bing is so much faster, smoother and slicker.

When it comes to clicking through on an image Google almost wins. Google gives you a background of the web page and superimposed upon that is the full size image. To the right is information about the image with the warning “This image may be subject to copyright”.

Bing’s does not have the same initial impact, but it does display a scrollable list of thumbnails of your search results to the left of the screen. This is very useful if the image you have selected turns out not to be exactly what you need and you want to review the alternatives.

Who wins? It has to be Bing. It is much faster, easier on the eye, has equally relevant results and has an extra ‘more sizes’ option. And finally… it just feels right.

Google, images

Google experiments with Image Swirl

November 19, 2009 Karen Blakeman 1 Comment

Having made Google Image Options (including colour) and Similar Images available as part of their standard image search, Google are now playing around with Image Swirl in Google Labs. According to Google it “builds on new computer vision research to cluster similar images into representative groups in a fun, exploratory interface”. In practice it is a combination of similar images and the Wonderwheel.

One of my image test searches is Edvard Munch and Swirl came back with 12 thumbnails of stacked images (12 is the standard number of stacks) :

Click on a group of stacked images and another set of images “swirl” into view in the form of the wonderwheel:

And you can keep on clicking on groups/stacks of images but still keep the “history” of your selections.

I was pleasantly surprised by the clustering or stacking of the images. I thought that by the time I had reached ‘level 3’ of my browsing each stack would be just different versions of the same image or images with similar colour composition. My Edvard Munch level 3 selection, however, came up with a selection of landscapes with different colours. They did, though, seem to have similar ‘patterns’, for examples paths or what could be interpreted as paths as a major component of the image.

Phil Bradley has also reviewed Google Swirl and comments “Bing is going to have their work cut out to try and catch up.” Far too polite, Phil. I’d say “Bing, eat your heart out!”

Google Swirl looks very promising and I shall be monitoring its progress with interest.

images

Searching for images by colour

September 16, 2009 Karen Blakeman 2 Comments

This is not a frequently asked question on my workshops but when it is raised by one of the participants it generates a great deal of interest amongst the rest. So far I have come across three that I would recommend trying.

The first is Exalead’s Chromatik, which is part of the Exalead Labs experimental area. This enables you to search a selection of Flickr images by colour and optionally by keyword. You first select one or more colours or hues from a palette which are added to a bar below the palette. You can adjust the proportions of the colours in the photos by moving the separators between the colours in the bar. Luminosity can be toggled between bright and dark, and saturation between colourful and grey levels. The last option in the list is to search for specific images using keywords (I assume this searches the titles, tags and descriptions associated with the Flickr images). The implication is that once you have selected your colours you can then limit your search to particular objects. In practice, if you search for colour followed by keyword, Chromatik ignores your colour choices and searches only on your keywords. If, for example, you want to search for apples of a particular colour you must first search on apples and then pick your colours.

It pays to keep the number of colour choices to two or three, even if you require very specific colours, as this will give you a wider range of images to choose from. When the thumbnails are displayed you can hover over the best match and select “show images with same colors”. Click on an image and it is displayed full size, but in order to see further information about it you have to right click and select properties. This will give you a URL for the original image on Flickr but only for the image itself. It does not take you to the “full” Flickr page for the photo, which means that you cannot check ownership and copyright.

The second tool is Multicolr Search Lab from Idée Inc. This uses “10 million of the most “interesting” Creative Commons images on Flickr”. As with Chromatik you select colours from a palette. You can select up to ten colours and click on the same colour several times if you wish to increase its prominence in the photo. Unfortunately there is no keyword search. On the plus side, if you find an image you like simply click on the image to go straight to its page on Flickr where you can double check the copyright situation.

And of course there is Google’s image search. Carry out a search on your keywords in Google images and above the results there is an option to select a colour. There are only twelve colours from which to choose and you can only select one but it works well enough. If you want to search only Creative Commons images then carry out the first stage of your search in the Advanced Image Search screen and select the appropriate option from the Usage Rights menu.

Google, images, Search Engines

Free-to-use images might not be

July 16, 2009 Karen Blakeman 4 Comments

You may have already read that Google now includes a creative commons license filter option in its Advanced Image search screen. Creative Commons is a series of licenses that can be applied to a variety of works such as images, video and PowerPoint presentations and they specify what you can and cannot do with those works. Information on the licenses can be found on the Creative Commons web site at http://www.creativecommons.org/.

Google does not use the CC terminology but has instead generated a pull down menu with the options: labelled for reuse, labelled for commercial reuse, labelled for reuse for modification, and labelled for commercial reuse for modification.

There is another option at the top of the list that is the default: not filtered by license. I had to think twice about this one because my first thoughts were that this was for public domain images. It is not. The “not filtered” option is all images. I ran the license options past a few people over the past week and they all immediately assumed that the default option is for images that you can use as you want. A couple, though, then asked how “labelled for reuse” differed from this and then they became totally confused by the whole thing. To make it worse, the licenses as listed by Google do not cover all the possible CC license conditions, for example attribution and share alike. So once you have done your search you still have to check the full license for the image that you wish to use. Furthermore, very few people are aware that you have to cite the license and any attribution as requested by the author.

Google says in its help files:

“By returning these search results, Google isn’t making any representation that the linked content is actually or lawfully offered under a Creative Commons license. It’s up to you to verify the terms under which the content is made available and to make your own assessment as to whether these terms are lawfully applied to the content.”

The accuracy and validity of the Google implied license was raised recently in The Register: The tragedy of the Creative Commons . It comments:

“Since there’s no guarantee that the licence really allows you to use the photo as claimed, then the publisher (amateur or professional) must still perform the due diligence they had to anyway. So it’s safer (and quicker) not to use it at all.”

I disagree with that: I recommend using it as a first level filter but then check with the original web site regarding the details of the license. At least you won’t be spending hours wading through “all rights reserved” images.

If you do use the license filter you will notice that many of the photos come from Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo!. Yahoo! has had a Creative Commons filter on its Image Advanced Search screen for a long time but only on the US site, not the UK. A far better way of searching CC Yahoo images is to go straight into Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/. This gives you a description of the different licenses and you can search images assigned that license. This assumes, of course, that the person who has uploaded the image is the owner of that image and there are stories that this is not always so. But how paranoid do you have to be? With respect to Flickr my approach is to take the photographer’s word for it unless there are serious inconsistencies in their photostream, for example the meta data associated with the photos suggests that they were in Armenia, New Zealand and Peru on the same day!

So where do you go for images that really are free to use. There is a trick you can use in Google to pull up just public domain images. Carry out your search on the standard Image search screen and when the results come up add

&as_rights=cc_publicdomain

to the end of the string in your br0wser address bar, and press enter. (Thanks to Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land for this tip) . The test searches I have tried so far come up with photos from NASA, US government sites and Wikimedia Commons. NASA is a safe bet for public domain images as are US government web pages, although there are a few exceptions but these are clearly labelled with any copyright restrictions.. A recent spat between Wikimedia Commons and the UK’s National Portrait Gallery – National Portrait Gallery bitchslaps Wikipedia: Hands off our photos! – has thrown suspicion on the validity of CC and public domain licenses attached to its photos. This appears to have been an isolated incident, though, and the high resolution images have now been removed if you are accessing the site from the UK.

Another source of public domain images is MorgueFile, which is a small database of high resolution photos but you may have to play around with your search terms before you find exactly what you want.

If you are looking for photos of buildings or locations in the UK then head straight for Geograph. This aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland. Anyone can upload photos provided that they adhere to the guidelines and attach a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Geograph has saved me so much time. A few months ago I was trying to find a photo of the Great Expectations pub in Reading, Berkshire. Google, Yahoo and Live (now Bing) insisted on giving me photos of people reading a copy of Charles Dickins’s Great Expectations while sitting in a pub in Berkshire. The image I wanted was probably somewhere in the list but I was not prepared to trawl through hundreds of results to find it. I typed in Great Expectations Reading into Geograph and I was there in a couple of seconds. Brilliant!

If you are interested in finding out more about finding and using images head for JISC Digital Media – Still Images.

Karen Blakeman's Blog