Improve Flickr Search With Google Images
In a commercial edition like Lifehacker, when we need an image for our posts, we can’t just google the image and get the first result. We must use licensed photographs. Sometimes we use our own original photos, sometimes Getty images that we pay for, sometimes millions of Flickr photos licensed for free through Creative Commons.
But since 2014, Google Images also allows users to filter photos by license . And unlike Flickr, Google Images uses some of the most sophisticated search algorithms on the planet. So it can find some Flickr photos that even Flickr can’t.
For a recent post, I needed a great shot of hand towels. A Flickr search for “hand towels” found many hands near and around towels, as well as the usual Second Life screenshots and NSFW images. Flickr just knew I needed hands and towels.
But Google figured out that my phrase mattered and found more relevant hand towels like the beautiful red and yellow number in my post . Flickr knew it was an image of a towel, but could not recognize the “hand” part because the word did not appear anywhere on the main page of the image.
Google’s artificial intelligence algorithms could literally recognize that it was a hand towel, or perhaps Google simply knew that other sites had linked or embedded an image with the relevant phrase. Anyway, he dug up an image that was not clearly marked, but was exactly what I needed.
So for any complex image search, you can still dig into Google’s Tools menu before trying a dedicated engine. Google Images will filter images by size, color, age, license, or even select photos, faces, line art, animation, or pictures.
If you are doing a license search, you will still need to navigate from Google results to the original image page to validate the license and follow any restrictions, such as attribution. Google is powerful, but not perfect, and you can’t blame it when someone pounces on you for using their photo without following the rules.