Images form an integral part of the Internet; they appear on just about every web page that you look at - with perhaps the exception of this page! There are probably going to be two reasons why you're looking for images on the Internet - either to include them in a web page that you're writing for yourself, in which case you'll be looking for icons, bullets, backgrounds and other assorted graphics, or you'll be looking for an image in order to answer a query that you've been asked about. This page should hopefully provide you with some help in finding both types.
I'm not a lawyer, and nor do I play one on the Internet. However, please bear in mind that when someone creates an image (and text, of course), they own the copyright on that image. Unless it clearly states that the image is in the public domain, please exercise caution over what you do with any of the images that you download from the Internet, and seek permission before including them on any web pages that you produce, or include in any articles that you may be writing for example. Hopefully the page with the image(s) on should be quite clear in informing you as to what you can, and cannot do with the image. I think the golden rule is that unless you are certain that the image is in the public domain, ask before using it!
There are essentially two different types of image that you'll find on the Internet, and they'll have the extention .gif or .jpg. There are a small number of other file types that are slowly becoming more popular, but I'd be prepared to say that 99% of all the images you find will be in one or other of these formats. Photographs are generally to be found as .jpg images, while icons and cartoon type pictures with lots of block colour will be found as .gif images. For the most part, you can ignore this, although it may be important if you want a specific type of image for use on a web page as an icon. You'll probably find it helpful to focus your search on .gif images in that case. Alternatively, if you're looking for photographs they will most likely be found as .jpg images. However, this is not a hard and fast rule, so while limiting to a particular file type may give you a smaller number of hits, you may be excluding other images that would work perfectly well for whatever your purposes happen to be.
Most of the standard search engines will provide you with some basic
methods of searching for images, and the following are some examples of how you
can quickly find images.
AltaVista
There are two methods of
finding images at Altavista; the first is to use the switch 'image:' to locate
any images that have a specific name. Consequently, if you are searching for
images of the ship the Titanic, you could run a search like this -
image:titanic and that will return hits of web pages that include any images
called 'titanic' on them. You could focus your search a little more closely by
doing a search for image:titanic.jpg to try and retrieve mainly photographs.
The problem here of course is that there is no saying that an image called
'titanic' is going to be of the ship - it might be a still from the film, or
indeed anything that the web author thinks deserves the name titanic.
Consequently, you will probably want to use the image; switch in conjunction
with some other search terms. In this example, I would probably try and narrow
my search down to something more specific by doing a search on AltaVista such
as:
image:titanic ship iceburg "maiden voyage"
which should go a long way
to excluding references to other types of 'titanic'.
The second way of
searching for images at AltaVista is to use their picture finder. This is a
specialised search engine which looks for images on web pages, and is a
reasonably useful search engine. At this point I would caution you to consider
using the filtered version of this image finder - you might be amazed at the
number of undesirable images that it is possible to unearth with even the most
innocent of words! The interface is simple and straightforward to use, and you
have the choice of looking for pictures or moving images for example. Once
AltaVista has returned the hits to you, it's simply a case of paging through
them until you find the one that is suitable for your purposes. You may want to
try the option of finding images that are similar, but in my personal
experience this does not work terribly well, though you might always be lucky,
of course!
HotBot
HotBot allows the
searcher to input the term that they are interested in and instead of searching
for it in the text of web pages, it will look for web pages that contain images
of that name. This can be done by simply clicking in the appropriate box.
HotBot does appear to be particularly strong on images - a search for images of
'titanic' returned 17,558 with AltaVista, but a whopping 109,640 with HotBot.
This simply emphasises the need to focus the search more closely using other
keywords.
Lycos
Simply input the
term that you are interested in and click on the Pictures box to limit your
search to images, rather than text on web pages.
Yahoo!
In common with
AltaVista, Yahoo! provides several ways of finding images. Perhaps the most
straightforward way is to simply type in the term 'image' or 'graphics' into
the search box. Running a search for 'images' lists 31 categories and 9045
individual sites, so it is probably best used to give yourself an overview of
the images that are available in different subject areas such as "Government
> U.S. Government > Military > Navy > Submarines > Images" for
example. If you are particularly interested in obtaining graphics for web
pages, Yahoo! is probably going to be the one single best source to use. Simply
search for 'web page images' and you'll get several hits to places in the
Yahoo! hierachy that will be of assistance.
Yahoo! also has an image
search engine, but surprisingly, this is not apparent from their opening web
page. The Image Surfer can be found at http://ipix.yahoo.com/ and currently has six
different categories - Art, Entertainment, People, Recreation, Science and
Vehicles. You can either search for a specific term, or you can simply browse
through the list of categories, although this does rely very heavily on luck if
you are to get good results!
Stopstock
This site
gives access to 11 different commercial image providers, and their databases
can be accessed through the Stopstock front end. Unfortunately, you cannot do a
multi-search across all providers, but you have to search each in turn, which
can be a little tiresome. However, the search engine does work quickly and
effectively, so it could be much worse, I suppose!
After the search has
been run you are presented with a list of images that match your search term,
and these are kept deliberately low resolution. However, even having said that,
the quality is quite acceptable for general viewing. The idea behind this is,
of course, to encourage you to register with the image provider and purchase
the particular image.
The Amazing Picture
Machine
I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call it 'amazing' myself,
but it is simple, quick and easy to use. I suspect that their database is on
the small size, since my search for 'titanic' only came up with two images, but
they were both on-topic. After the search has been run you are provided with a
summary of the results, and you can then choose to click on one in order to
view the image. This is a nice touch, since it speeds up the whole process and
if your search yields a great many results it's a quick and easy way of
browsing through them, without having to wait for all the images to load.
The
Corbis Collection
Another AltaVista based offering, this time giving
access to over 500,000 photographs, so you're almost bound to find what you're
looking for. My search on 'titanic' produced 172 results, but only a small
number of these were related to the ship. Quite strong on space images.
The Sunsite
ImageFinder
This is a collection of individual image search engines
which between them provide you with access to perhaps the biggest total
collection of images on the Internet. There tends to be a bias towards America,
such as images on Californian history, the American Memory and the Smithsonian,
but it should also be noted that there are also large collections of
Architectural images, 13,000 images from the Australian National Library and a
link to the NASA images library server.
Webseek
Webseek styles
itself as a content based image, video search and catalogue tool. The format is
the familiar Yahoo! approach, and the coverage is reasonably comprehensive,
with 16 major categories to search in. My 'titanic' search resulted in 239
hits, most of which were related to the ship. Recommended.
Demon Image libraries and
graphical counters
Demon Internet Services are one of the largest
ISP's in the UK and they have put together a small (4) list of image
collections that are designed to make it easier to add images to web pages. Not
restricted to Demon users however, so if you want images on your pages, it
might be worth while taking a look and following the links.
Aphids
This is
a personal collection of links to image libraries, as well as general
information on images, image tools and references. Useful starting point.
There are a great many newsgroups that are dedicated to images. People post photographs and images of different types and these can be saved using your newsreader and used for whatever purpose you want. Be warned though, since a great many illegally copied images turn up in newsgroups, so you need to be extra careful before using them. The main hierarchy is alt.binaries.pictures.<something else>. Your newsreader can be used to track down the particular group that you're interested in, though be aware that if you are of faint heart you might be disturbed at some of the image newsgroups that you will see.
Once you've found an image that you want to keep put your mouse over the image and press the right mouse button. Choose the save image option, and save it to an appropriate place on your own computer/network. It's really that simple.
The good news is there are a lot of web pages on the Internet that contain sound files, but the bad news is that the vast majority are of movie/tv clips and I suspect that they are in breach of copyright. Consequently, the warning that I gave for images should be repeated for sound files - before you make use of sound files please do check to make sure that you're allowed to use them. Some sites are explicit about what you can/cannot do with sound files, particularly those of film studios and record labels. Many of the sound libraries that you'll find have collected files from a variety of places, and they may not have been so rigourous in obtaining permissions to include the sounds that they make available. Therefore, if in doubt, check first!
An increasing number of search engines will now give you the option of
searching for sounds/web pages that contain sounds. The Altavista Photo and
Media Finder allows you to search for web pages that contain certain sounds. A
good practice search to try is 'connery' and this should return pages
that have sound files that are either of the actor Sean Connery, or are
impressions of him.
Lycos and HotBot also have sound options that you
can chose when doing a search - with Lycos, just click on the Sound and
Pictures option, and with HotBot you can choose to include audio in the
advanced options.
There are a lot of websites that are simply libraries of sound files. Some of those that I use are:
There are four newsgroups that people will post sounds to. You can be virtually certain that each and every one of these does not have copyright clearance!
Well, it depends entirely on the type of sound file, and if you have the
appropriate plug-in utility available. The majority of files are going to be
.wav or .mid files, and you can simply click on the link for the file and your
browser will then open a small window on the page and collect the file for you.
You can then play it using the Windows default audio player. It should do this
automatically, but you can replay it or save it if you wish to.
You may
sometimes find that there are other types of sound file, such as MP3 files. To
save going into great detail here, you should almost always find that if a site
makes use of files that you cannot automatically play it will include a link to
a site where you can download an appropriate plug in utility. Go to the
appropriate site, download and install the utility and you'll then have no
problem listening to the file!
© Phil Bradley, 1999