Photops Blog

Google’s image search is one of the fastest ways to find a picture of just about anything, but that doesn’t mean you can use all of the images you find on your website or blog. We’ve shied away from finding images for Download Squad on Google Image Search in the past, because it’s hard to find and credit the creator of the image and be sure you have permission to use it. Google just made it a lot easier, though, by adding the option to search for Creative Commons-licensed images.

The terms of Creative Common licenses vary, but if you go to “advanced image search,” you can choose to filter images by the reuse and modification privileges their licenses allow. If you search for Creative Commons images, Google will also throw in other images that are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation license or in the public domain. Google says it’s still a user’s responsibility to click through and verify that the licensing information is actually correct, but that’s still a lot easier than sifting through thousands of image results yourself, looking for one you can use.

Weblog Google Operating System points out a new search option in Google Image Search that filters images by color. Color search isn’t available as an operator yet, but a simple URL hack will do the trick.

To start searching Google by image color, all you have to do is append &imgcolor=colorname to the URL of a Google Image Search—where colorname is replaced by one of a number of colors of your choice. So, for example, your search URLs might look like this:

http://images.google.com/images?q=cat&hl=en&imgcolor=green

This isn’t the first time a search engine has added support for searching by color, of course. Previously mentioned apps like Colr Pickr, Multicolr, and Yotophoto all aim to do the same, but they’re each more specialized, covering only Flickr pics (the first two) and stock photos (the last). It’s nice to have this functionality built into Google.

Do you want to know how to look for icons or wallpapers of specific size and file type using Google image search? One of the hidden features of Google image search is option to set specific image size to search for. For example, instead of choosing very general small or large image size you can set image size in pixels 256×256 or 1920×1200. You can also specify required image type: png, jpg or gif.

imagesize:256×256 filetype:png gimp
imagesize:1280×1024 filetype:jpg design