| 22/01/2008 |
|
|
What to find a great photo or perfect celebrity picture? This list of best image search engines will help you find interesting photos in the easiest way possible. You will learn about hidden preferences, unique features that will make you searches images like a professional and actually find the best images possible. Check them out… and see their test results on Aishwarya Rai.
Photo by Amanda
Imagery
Imagery is my favorite image search engine due to the intuitive interface. This has a cool tabbed search interface to browse your searched images. Just keep searching new image terms, which keep compiling in new tabs, click to load full size image at the bottom or in new window. Loads 20-100 images at a time in ajax-y fashion. Best for research and keep collecting all your search images easily. You can tweak preferences to select JPG, GIF or PNG, sort by size, sort by black and white, grayscale or color and of course get safe for work images too. Test
Google Images Search
Google Image Search is probably the most common image search engine you might have used. Gives you thousands of image results very fast. But a limitation is you need to click to the image source page to see the full size image (Power it up with Google Image Ripper to get no more thumbnails and load full size images directly). You can sort images by JPG, GIF, BMP or PNG, sort by b&W or color, with an option for extra large images. You can also search news content and faces too! (Face test). Improve Google Image Search results using the Google Image Labeler. Use more filters to stop that NSFW image with moderate filtering or strict filtering. Test.
Yahoo! Image Search
Yahoo Image Search will find photos and clicking on images will take you to the source page with a framed interface, with an option to mail to a friend. You can opt for color and b&w by quick links. Select photo size with a wallpaper mode too which gives you images on all usual desktop sizes (Test wallpapers). It gives related searches too at the bottom of results. Its also powers the AlltheWeb search engine. Test.
Ask Images
Ask Images Search will search your desired images and suggest ways to expand or narrow your search for better results. A unique preference is finding buddy icons (Test). It will suggest related information from Wikipedia, videos from Youtube, news, profiles and more. Test.
MSN Live Image Search
MSN Live Image Search searches through all images of your choice. One cool option is to search “Showing only images of your desktop size” to find that ideal wallpaper even if you do not know your display settings. Another cool feature is you can drag images from the search results to a scratchpad and create a photo collection. Find related results. You can adjust a slider to see smaller thumbnails and fit in more photos. Test
AltaVista Image Search
AltaVista Image Search has similar search results, with an option to select graphics and buttons / banners too. You can also quickly sort by a huge range of prefixed desktop sizes and very useful to find wallpapers for your desktop (Test 1024×768 wallpapers). Clicking on “more info” below those images will take you a list of all webpages that host that same image. Test
Picsearch
PicSearch claims to index 2 billion images on the web. All images are output-ed as thumbnails and click through to a framed page with the original source. Selecting the preferences you can select only animations only. You can also sort images by various image sizes based by pixels (Test <50px). And they are family friendly images by default, which cannot be changed. Test. It also powers Ditto.
Exalead Image Search Engine
Exalead will let you change the background to black or white. Then you can customize it to find few prefixed size desktop wallpapers. It can also search faces. You can again choose color or B&W and image sizes. You can click on options to view direct image links with no frames. Or click the image to browse the images and their source sites in frames. Test.
Pixsy
Pixsy will let you search and extract images from popular free image hosting services Webshots, Photobucket, Sevenload, SuperiorPics, ViewImages etc. Switch the media type to Images in the drop down options. Clicking the image will take you to the framed page, where you can browse images, and see source page. You can email or save to ‘My Pixsy’ too. Test.
Visoo
Visoo uses the power of its Visual Content Analysis to provide highly accurate information on the visual content contained within digital images, information that cannot be obtained from any other online source. With Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, it recognizes text in graphics and images and can even analyze colored type or transparent text on any background. You can also check the People option for face recognition and select no banners.
Netvue
Netvue is another cool image search tool. The images are organized as a slideshow, you can regulate the slide show speed and even turn it off. Browse thumbnail images to a central window, with links to original full size image source. Test
Flickr
Flickr Images – Its the top image sharing community on the web sharing their best photos with you. Many unique photos can be found, many personally photographed and with copyrights reserved. You can browse in detailed or thumbnail view. Another option is to sort by View: Most relevant or Most recent or Most interesting (test) as judged by the community. Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license, which means you can use their content with some rights reserved. Test.
Webshots
Webshots is another huge photo sharing community where people upload their choicest photos and share them. Lookout for copyright issues in these photo album collections. They have a desktop software to have fun with your wallpapers and screensavers. Test.
Photobucket
Photobucket is a huge resource of great images. It is a free online image hosting service that gives webmasters a free alternative to host large images, saving their server bandwidth. Most images might not have a copyright notice, so beware before reusing. Test.
Getty Images
Getty Images Search - They are famous for those unique stock photos you find on magazines, newspapers and corporate new blogs worldwide. Browse through their huge collection and find unique images not indexed by other search engines. In the multiple options, select only Editorial Images (All Editorial, All time). You can also sort by Horizontal or Vertical. Register to get price quote. Test.
Corbis
Corbis is another popular huge database that provides stock Images. You can search through Rights Managed, Royalty-Free images. You can search by Photography and Illustrations too. But you need to register with Corbis – to license the best images available, view and download large images with no watermarks, use personalized lightboxes to store and share your favorite images and license and download images online. Free stock photos can also be found at Clipart.com, FreeFoto, Stock.xchng
Warning on Usage - Image search engines help you find the best photos and images online, but that does not make them yours to crop, edit and photoshop. Many of these images you find are copyrighted and for personal use. Some photos are shared with limited creative commons licenses and some rights reserved. Enjoy them but lookout for the copyright notices and if you are allowed to reuse them.
Tags: #Blogging #Celebrity #Google #Lists #SEO #Tips #Tools #Popular
RSS
Twitter
Facebook
This is an Excellent Compilation. I didnt know about many of these Image sites. This is very helpful indeed, and now I have many options to scout for images for my blog posts!
Very unique compilation. I am going to try Imagery based on your recommendation.
This is a great list. I thought I was already aware of most of the websites to obtain photos from. I have bookmarked this post and I will definitely refer back to it again.
Stumbled Upon this page and I love this list, thanks. I agree that Flickr and its support for Creative Commons is a great resource. I am working on a way to browse and search for interesting images with the CC license on Flickr and browsing easily among them. Here’s the interface http://www.slidebay.com/Lookups/pixIndex/ — hoping this is in topic and useful…
the slidebay interface is cool.
I added a metasearch capability for images to Widow.com some time back. You can search Google, Yahoo, MSN, Picsearch, and more all at once with Widow Metasearch’s Image Search. Try it here:
http://www.widow.com/image-search.php
For some reason the your desktop size and scratchpad options on live image search arent showing up for me. I don’t even hav the options for them….there’s a blank space where they should be. Hav any idea why??? Plz tell me why.
There is another image search engine – Picollator. It is able to search images by content and find pictures containing similar faces.
Try it here: http://www.picollator.com
Very impressive review of image search sites! Congratulations on the thorough job.
The main addition to your list that I’d suggest is Zuula image search at:
http://www.zuula.com/img_srch/image_index.html
Zuula provides a simple way to get and review search results from many different search engines, all at one site. You can get search results from top engines like Google or Yahoo, or you can get results from less well-known sites like Pixsy or Stock.xchng. And you can do this for image searches or web searches or a variety of different other types of search.
Keep up the great work!
Good compilation. However, nothing is about true image search. I mean image search by images, not by text. I can mention at least two new engines focused on the real image search: http://www.like.com for shopping and http://www.picollator.com for anything.
Nice list man.. good work.. :)
Informative!
thanks you !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It’s very useful !
Thanks 2 the articles and comments.
;)
I have always used google to search for images as I wasn’t aware that there are many other image search engines.
Will definitely bookmark this page.
Find Similar images with http://www.tineye.com
Very cool compilation! I prefer to use Ginipic to search all of those together. They have an awesome interface and cool features like drag&drop, favorites, wallpaper change – really rocks.
Best of all it’s free! http://Www.ginipic.com
These are some handy tips, thanks! I’ve been looking for something else besides the standard google image search.
I use Google, find the image I need, host them on http://www.hostanyimage.com and use whenever I need. The reason I use an image host, coz we simply cannot hotlink to another web page. That’s bandwidth stealing and webmasters may sue you.
One more I’d consider: CoolIris (www.cooliris.com). Awesome interface!
i found a great usefull image search http://www.unlimages.com
also other free image search sites like http://imagesi.com are available for using google image api.
best is the image bing.. new search image bing.. http://images.bing.com/
What’s missing for me is the ability to find out where an image came from. Say you get an email with a cute doggie in it. Who took it? Where did it come from? That technology would be great! The only site I know that tries to do that is TinyEye.com, but their database is smaller than their name.
Cheers HowardP
http://www.tineye.com does a great job of finding the same image elsewhere on the web. It does this with exif data. I have a favorite pic that I knew nothing about and have kept it for years waiting to learn more. Came across tineye and in seconds I had enough info to connect the dots.
Also, a site that will give you the exif data for pics online is findexif.com. Amazingly informative.
:)
My school district blocks anything with images – frustrating when trying to create a Powerpoint – but they haven’t gotten to all of these! The majority are blocked, yes, but there are also a few that are quite nice. I wouldn’t have found them without this list. :)
nice post !!!
very useful one!!
Try this image host http://www.stockimage.us
flickr and photobucket is leading website now for images, anyway useful information, thank you
Following my monitoring, billions of persons in the world receive the mortgage loans at good banks. Hence, there’s a good possibility to get a commercial loan in all countries.
And what about tinEye???
http://www.tineye.com/
I would like to bring this one to peoples attention.
They seem to only find large, quality images, rather than a load of irrelevant small rubbish.
They claim to visually check every image and, although I find that hard to believe, the results do seem pretty good!
You even get a large image preview when you hover over the small thumbnail which i really like.
Also, the image view page gives you far more information about the image then just size. I even saw one with what type of camera the photo was taken with – together with exposure settings!
It might help if you gave us the link!
Very thank for sharing your posts and you review.many people have replyed here,and i would like to take part in.I’d like to share a Proverb with each
other one here that is:Every day of thy life is a leaf in thy history. A Proverbs wiht great sense,i hope everyone would learn something from it.
I’ve been using Fotoholder it has no ads, the maximum image size allowed is only 2M but this is all I need…
email correction. sorry.
Don’t underrate your own site. If you will update this site, it’s probably the best picture search engine site. Maybe you could start a site called “the 15 best ….. site”
Is there a site that will look up for unknown nameless pictures to find the photographer, artist, name of place, person or statue shown on it? Or did I not look to carefully for it.
Anyway, thanks a lot.