ce magazine march 2018 issue

Google Removes 'View Image' Button from Google
Image Search (and what you can do about it)
Last updated by rhiannon on 27. February 2018 - 02:14
Google has eliminated the 'View image" button
from its image search results and is making
copyright notices more noticeable in an effort to
prevent copyright infringement.
If you looked at an image in Google image search in the last few days and noticed
the 'View image' button was missing, it's not just you.
As part of a settlement with Getty Images, Google removed the 'View image' button
and 'Search by image' option when looking at an individual image in Google image
search results. This removes the option to take a look at an image without visiting
the site where the image is hosted. With the new changes, when you're looking at an
individual image the available options are 'Visit' and 'Share'. Visit will take you to
the site where the original image is hosted.
While the change is good for photographers and publishers (it directs traffic to
websites and can decrease copyright infringement), it adds a few steps to be able to
view an image. In addition to visiting the website where the image is, you may have
to scroll through the site to find the image, or the image you want may no longer be
on the website. Taking away the 'Search by image' option makes it harder to track
down attribution for an image and more difficult to have an image taken down for
any reason.
There are ways around this of course - you can drag and drop the image to a folder
or desktop, and right clicking the image and choosing 'Open image in new tab' or
'Save image as' (or whatever the equivalent is in the browser you use) will
download the image to your computer. While Google is a very good search engine
with many features, you can also opt for another search engine. Duckduckgo
is my favorite (see the write up by Robert on Duckduckgo here) and my second
choice is StartPage
. Both Duckduckgo
and StartPage
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