Tom Arah investigates the use of the web as a free online photo source.

It's a common question : how do you find images for your creative projects – for free. And at first sight the answer might seem obvious...
Simply type what you’re looking for into the search page at images.google.com, click the Search button, and in less than a second you will be looking at a page of 20 preview thumbnails, with dozens more only clicks away. Click on a thumbnail that catches your eye and you are taken to a generated framed page with a header area across the top giving details of the image size and below it a frame showing the image in situ on its original page. Once you’ve picked your image, simply right-click and select your browser’s Save To command.
It’s a simple and successful recipe that Yahoo has copied so closely with its own alternative, images.search.yahoo.com, that it’s difficult to tell the two apart. By comparison the image search at Microsoft’s Windows Live.com is very different – and superior in almost all respects thanks to its cleaner, more modern interface with its emphasis on visual selection. In particular the clutter of file information is removed so that you can concentrate on the thumbnails, calling up details and a larger preview of those images you are interested in with a simple mouseover. Also, rather than limiting pages to twenty thumbnails at a time, Live.com’s image search keeps downloading them so that as you scroll, or downscale the customizable thumbnail size, more appear. Best of all, when you click through to view the original image in situ, Live.com presents a framed side panel of thumbnails so that you don’t have to keep backtracking to view multiple options.

Windows Live.com reinvents web-wide image searching

Whichever of the big-name services you use, your first reaction is likely to be excitement – the promise of free and instant access to any image you could possibly imagine is naturally attractive. But while that vision remains mouth-watering, reality soon intrudes. To begin with, there’s the quality of the search. Google claims to offer the most comprehensive search on the web, but its sheer size brings its own problems. A search on a generic term such as “doctor” for example came back with 871,000 images! You can’t possibly wade through that number separating the wheat from the chaff – and it’s not easy for the search engines either working as they do on a very limited number of parameters such as file name, ALT description and surrounding text. Again for the “doctor” search for example, Google’s top twenty images included three images of anti-spyware software, two of “the frog doctor” at work, and one each of a scantily-clad Carry On nurse and of a teenager killed on a boot camp.
It’s not just the search quality which is questionable, even more important is the image quality. Any self-respecting web designer is trying to keep their pages’ bandwidth requirements to an absolute minimum which means small, size-for-size onscreen images that have been heavily compressed either as restricted palette GIFs or as lossy JPEGs. As such you can immediately forget about using the vast majority of the images that your image search returns. At 200 dpi print resolution for example even a comparatively large 640 x 480 screen image would be limited to around 3”x 2” on paper.