Google To Kill Off 'View Image' Button In Search 153
Google is removing the "view image" button that appeared when you clicked on a picture, which allowed you to open the image alone. The provision to remove the button is part of a deal Google has made with stock-photo agency Getty to end their legal battle. The Register reported last week that the two companies announced a partnership that "will allow Google to continue carrying Getty-owned photographs in its image and web search results." The Verge reports: The change is essentially meant to frustrate users. Google has long been under fire from photographers and publishers who felt that image search allowed people to steal their pictures, and the removal of the view image button is one of many changes being made in response. The intention seems to be either stopping people from taking an image altogether or driving them through to the website where the image is found, so that the website can serve ads and get revenue and so people are more likely to see any associated copyright information. That's great news for publishers, but it's an annoying additional step for someone trying to find a picture. Now you'll have to wait for a website to load and then scroll through it to find the image. Websites sometimes disable the ability to right click, too, which would make it even harder for someone to grab a photo they're looking for.
In addition to removing the "view image" button, Google has also removed the "search by image" button that appeared when you opened up a photo, too. This change isn't quite as big, however. You'll still be able to do a reverse image search by dragging the image to the search bar, and Google will still display related images when you click on a search result. The button may have been used by people to find un-watermarked versions of images they were interested in, which is likely part of why Google pulled it.
In addition to removing the "view image" button, Google has also removed the "search by image" button that appeared when you opened up a photo, too. This change isn't quite as big, however. You'll still be able to do a reverse image search by dragging the image to the search bar, and Google will still display related images when you click on a search result. The button may have been used by people to find un-watermarked versions of images they were interested in, which is likely part of why Google pulled it.
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I also get to decide if video streams can be saved to disk for later viewing.
And then people complain about DRM schemes and EME using closed source components and not being well supported on unusual platforms...
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In this case, I'm afraid the "backwards ways" are yours. Welcome to the 21st century, where creative industries are big, the Internet is the dominant communications channel, the Web is no longer a small and informal collection of hobbyist content, and being online no longer puts you effectively above the law.
I get that some people liked the way things used to be. I get why, too. But the world moves on, and the idea that multi-billion dollar businesses aren't going to protect their legal rights because some
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Except that the people who would take your image to post as a one-off image macro on imgur, or to use in their homework for a PowerPoint presentation, aren't likely to be able to afford the exorbitant fees you'd charge to use your image anyway. If you want to get paid for your work from the little guy, charge prices little guys can afford, and make it very easy and quick to do so. Otherwise, people will always (and I mean always) find ways to get around your smug attempts at preventing them from using their
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Great rant. Economically impractical, and much of it was a straw man talking about freely available pictures when the context was video streams (many of which are indeed paywalled), but great rant.
For future reference, if you want to know why people ripping content don't just get to win this one, ask yourself who is doing the work and contributing the value in this picture and who is contributing literally nothing in your world view, and that's your answer.
Also, at the risk of bringing stupid things like di
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If it's in the internet, you gave it away.
Well, no, because if you want access to it then you have to accept our terms of business and pay us first. Even if you didn't, you still have to follow the law or accept the potential consequences of breaking it.
Fortunately for the rest of humanity, people like you don't actually own the Internet or have any right or ability to tell the rest of us how we may or may not use it. You're just someone shouting from the top of a cliff about something you don't like, and you're welcome to ignore those of us making
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This isn't about the 'view image' function of a browser, but the 'view image' button in google image search results.
IOW they stop hotlinking the actual image.
IOW open source or not, you cannot fix or work around that.
Easier solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't display Getty media in your search results.
That'll learn 'em.
Re:Easier solution (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed! Agree on a meta-tag to exclude such image-convenience-features, and sites that want to be Scrooges can add it to the pages.
Jeeez, stop slowing down my porn browsing to make a few bad apples happy.
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Indeed! Agree on a meta-tag to exclude such image-convenience-features, and sites that want to be Scrooges can add it to the pages.
Jeeez, stop slowing down my porn browsing to make a few bad apples happy.
Everyone knows that's the one area that bing outperforms google anyway. Switch to bing for that.
Re: Easier solution (Score:1)
Exactly. I want a checkbox to exclude Getty, they don't have any good pr0n anyways!
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Exactly. I want a checkbox to exclude Getty, they don't have any good pr0n anyways!
I would settle for a way to exclude a site from the search terms. You might think it would be trivially easy (and if others think it is, I would be glad to see examples) but recently while tracking down the source of an image, my results were swamped with reposts from that sucking tar-pit of image sites, Pinterest. I wanted to exclude all such, and spent about half an hour reading the notes for google's advanced image search options, which read like perl on acid. None of the examples I tried worked, so I dr
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Once upon a time, you could actually set Google Search to ignore results from specific sites on an ongoing basis. But that was too useful a feature and had to be axed...
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As was pointed out by others you can remove sites with -site: but it would be handy if Google would let you set up some parameters that always get passed to searches (unless turned off with a checkbox near the search entry). This way you wouldn't have to enter in -site:getty.com if you always wanted to exclude Getty from your image searches. I'm imagining preferences for each type of search (main, image, news, ...).
Yeah, right. (Score:2)
Don't display Getty media in your search results.
That'll learn 'em.
Getty Images is one of the largest and most significant photo archives in the world with over 80 million images and some 50,000 hours of video. Its stock images are prime goods and any professional in the field knows this.
Re:Yeah, right. (Score:5, Insightful)
So what? Regular users who use this function aren't after copyrighted images from Getty Images.
They're after the original versions of funny images without the watermarks automatically added by the dozens of websites hosting them. Those websites are not the owners of those images and yet they put those freakin' watermarks on them anyway. Fuck those websites.
The function is also useful when you're trying to find the original version of an image: a high-resolution PNG, instead of a low-resolution JPEG compressed to shit.
Re:Yeah, right. (Score:5, Funny)
I think most regular users use the image search to find the original galleries of porn JPGs :-)
Re:Easier solution (Score:4, Insightful)
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Don't display Getty media in your search results.
That'll learn 'em.
While I usually agree and even encourage this tactic when companies sue Google over search results, exactly how would one do that in this case? Ask Getty for a copy of every photo they ever had so they can filter search results? These won't just show up on Getty's site, but on sites that have licensed images for web use from them.
Re:Easier solution (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the features of Google Images is a "find other sizes of this image" function. If Getty did provide Google with copies of all their images [gettyimages.com], it'd be pretty easy for Google to block copies [google.com] from Google Images. (Note: the pic I selected is one of Getty's royalty-free pics.)
That's what baffles me about Getty suing Google over this. Google Images is the best thing that could happen to Getty. Not because of the publicity, but because Google Images makes it trivial to find copyright violations. Getty just has to put the URL for one of their copyrighted images into Google Images, and use the "find other sizes of this image" function to get a list of websites using that image. It's then trivial for them to cross-reference the list of websites to confirm they've properly licensed the image. Asking Google to neuter Google Images just reeks of a decision by some clueless manager or lawyer, with no input from someone who's actually on the front lines trying to find copyright violations for Getty. This is going to result in more violations of Getty's copyrights, not less.
Re:Easier solution (Score:5, Interesting)
If it is a stock image replace it with whitespace or the top result from the google image search for "stick figure" and the image caption or title.
For example: "stick figure" and "trump". See? Much better than whatever the original image was.
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A stock photo blocker would be the best thing ever.
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Couldn't the just block Google via robots.txt? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Robots.txt is too simplistic. If it allowed, say, permissions like "can index but no snippets or direct image links" it would help here. It was never designed for this kind of thing.
The other issue is sites that licence images from people like Getty. If Google links directly to the image then the accompanying copyright notice might not be displayed. Getty can't really stop its customers using the images they licensed, but they can demand Google ensures that the copyright notice is shown.
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They want the benefits of their images being included in search results but they are QQing.
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--
HI! please make a Firefox plug-in that blocks stock photos. Preferably it would replace them with the top result in a google search for "stick figure" and the image title, but white space will do in a pinch.
Frustrate Users (Score:1)
Or just push them to search images with another search engine?
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isn't that what duckduckgo uses for their back end?
It uses Bing.
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What do you mean, "another search engine"? There's YouPorn and... that's it.
Funny (Score:1)
When I want to remove my pics from Google I just deny their referrers. /shrug Don't people use Bing for images, anyway? *wink*
Leeching images (Score:2)
Can't servers (at least Apache) be configured with mod_rewrite to prevent leeching of images?
Re:Leeching images (Score:4, Insightful)
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What you seem to mean is that it's trivial in terms of techniques to copy an image. That doesn't affect whether you should or not.
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Of course. The image may also be cached elsewhere on the Net. These are not considered to violate copyright, since they're an inevitable result and don't themselves make copies that are usable. Similarly, it's legal in the US to make all copies appropriate for the running of lawfully obtained software.
I give it... (Score:3)
...24 hours before a plugin comes up to get the functionality back.
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Greasemonkey. Also you can add your own JS to any page by design of the addon making process anyway. So basically, you have to not allow addons at all, or vet every addon to not have that specific piece of javascript, which can probably be rewritten an infinite number of ways.
This battle is not winnable.
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Functionality? Did you catch what the problem is?
Google has long been under fire from photographers and publishers who felt that image search allowed people to steal their pictures...
Photographers and publishers want google to send your computer images, that you can't save.
It's DRM all over. "I want to send you something over the internet that you can see/hear, but that can't get saved on your computer."
Sure, you could restore this with a plugin, but it barely requires that. If it's on your screen, you can save it. FFS, it's already on your hard drive somewhere. I don't know of too many browsers that just store images in ram. Or is that
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FFS, it's already on your hard drive somewhere. I don't know of too many browsers that just store images in ram. Or is that why Chrome is such a damn memory hog....
Coming soon: Encrypted browser cache!
Only the browser executable has the ability to read the files it creates on the hard drive.
Re:I give it... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Somedays I think photographers and publishers have no idea how the internet works.
Of course they don't. I work at a web hosting company and my bosses don't know how the internet works either.
Re:I give it... (Score:4, Insightful)
Somedays I think photographers and publishers have no idea how the internet works.
Around 95% of the world population don't know how the internet works, especially so-called 'experts' commenting on hacking, malware or similar. They obviously don't know what they're talking about and they have no clue how to be critical of their sources.
Just yesterday the danish secretary of defense claimed that the WannaCry attack was the work of Russian government hackers (his source: NATO experts). No it wasn't. It was the work of a Russian cyber criminal, nothing more.
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The most perfect knowledge of how the Internet works won't help you distinguish between malware from a Russian government agency and malware from a Russian cyber criminal (if there's a real difference).
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Some people don't know exactly what the complaint was about, either. Specifically, most of /. users I'm reading here.
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Sure, you could restore this with a plugin, but it barely requires that. If it's on your screen, you can save it.
The original image isn't on your screen, the crappy Google thumbnail is.
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...24 hours before a plugin comes up to get the functionality back.
There's a web browser that still allows you to expand its functionality in a meaningful way?
I call it noscript, ublock, and requestpolicy. (Score:2)
It's My internet, bitches.
Change BAD (Score:1)
What the hell I use both of these functions on a regular basis.
google sucks now (Score:1)
Commercial erosion... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is essentially what was discussed rather extensively for the earlier decades of the internet at large, before and at the early eras of the world wide web.
As commercial forces work their way in, they see less and less of the technical marvel that makes the whole thing work and excel and what it does, and desire it to exist purely as a funnel of whatever is important to them at the moment.
And thanks to the wonders of the legal system, they can force that interpretation on everyone else, no matter the cost and waste of the platform in general.
The images this company posts are just that, they're images on a server. The server, well, serves them up to anyone that can make a request. If they don't like that, then they SHOULD have to figure out a special different way of accessing that data, and convince people to be willing to use that different interface, then close off the general access... but nah, they can't be bothered to do that - better to demand everyone else change the way they access those servers to be less generic, and only just how they'd like.
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If your server is openly and unreservedly serving any files, by your design, then you don't get to bitch about the files doing exactly what you configured.
What's that? Making your website anything but openly-and-unreservedly might cost you viewers?
[_] PICK
[_] ONE
boo hoo, woe is me, fucking engineers in the 80's and 90's, bunch of fucking eggheads, making shit functional, don't they know anything about business, anything about "managing" consumers, didn't ANYONE sensible sit in on their summits and protocol
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This is essentially what was discussed rather extensively for the earlier decades of the internet at large, before and at the early eras of the world wide web.
As commercial forces work their way in, they see less and less of the technical marvel that makes the whole thing work and excel and what it does, and desire it to exist purely as a funnel of whatever is important to them at the moment.
The most interesting thing to me is how people equate "The Internet" with "Google". If you can't Google up something, it's "not on the Internet" (and to most people, therefore "it doesn't exist".) That's people's concept of "The Internet".
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Approach and repeat ultimatum in an even firmer tone of voice. Add the words, "or else"
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If you need an add-on to disable Javascript, I pity you.
Block Getty (Score:5, Insightful)
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And Pinterest, while they're at it.
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And Pinterest, while they're at it.
Yes please. Most of the time you click the [Visit Page] button on Pinterest image hits in Goole Image searches you won't find the image (or anything like it) on the page that comes up. Complete waste of time. Pinterest is balls.
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Absolutely. Google is already indexing images by how similar they are to other images.
They could therefore filter away images that they have found on one of their blocked sites - or better: redirect to the original site, which in this case would be Getty Images' site itself.
Often when you are searching for a particular photo that has been shared a lot, you want to find the original source anyway.
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The work-around is in the article (Score:5, Informative)
The work-around is in the article:
Fortunately, there's still at least one way around it: if you right click, you can select "open image in new tab" or "view image" (or whatever your browser's equivalent option is), and you'll still open up the full-size picture. It's just a bit less likely that everyone will realize this is an option.
That Only Gives You Google's Thumbnail (Score:3)
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The idea is that Getty wants you to load the page the image is on (and the ads on the page the image is on). From that page you CAN right-click -> Open in new tab.
Bye bye google (Score:2)
Pretty Sick! (Score:2)
I use the picture view a lot to find objects, what about the other items - videos - maps etc. ?
Oh well down it goes.... maybe other search engines win over google on this one...
ain't gonna browse your shitty webpage (Score:2)
I used both of those functions on a regular basis, but usually just to adorn a smart-ass post with a smart-ass image.
Humour? Who needs it? Nothing I can't live without (as a married man).
Why Women Aren't Funny [vanityfair.com]
Perhaps Google can add a click that automatically opens the target website with Firefox's Media Preview tab (or your equivalent)—or an extension can be written to do the same; ideally, the extension would arrange the page's images in a Image Search–like image gallery (optional: middle fin
Thumbnail and watermark much? (Score:3)
A company like Getty is displaying usable images on the Internet and getting pissed off about copyright? How hard would it be for them to overlay a watermark that can't be easily 'shopped out? How many pixels are they displaying anyway? Anybody who's legit is going to want to scrub the watermark and resize the image without losing any more quality than necessary. They should be hiding high quality images behind a paid login if they care that much. Even Flickr can do that. Come on, Getty. Put on your big boy pants.
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Getty bills people to use shit they don't own.
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-getty-copyright-20160729-snap-story.html
They are fucking scum.
One mouse button (Score:2)
Only user input needed is so it can transfer money from your bank account to copyright holders.
Adblock (Score:2)
It's already gone (Score:1)
Not Google's Problem (Score:2)
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|js|css)$ - [F]
Use Hover Zoom+ (Score:1)
Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with following the link to the web site where the image is found is that very often the page is dynamic ("hottest news stories of today") and the image is nowhere to be found.
The People's Verge (Score:1)
No, it's meant to protect photographer's rights.
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Routing around damage... (Score:2)
tineye.com, drag, drop.
No problem (Score:2)
I'll just use Yandex' image search.
Its results are far less censored anyway.
https://yandex.com/images/ [yandex.com]
Why not block getty images? (Score:2)
Google is the good guy here? (Score:1)
I realize Getty does not seem to represent "the little guy"... but
Google knows how the internet works, artists and publishers do not?
Let's get real. Google exists because they serve ads.
An artist, photographer, publisher exists online because they serve ads,
or entice interested parties to learn more about them.
How else do you sell or generate revenue on the internet?
Some unknown is supposed to put up a paywall?
"View Image" Chrome & FF Extension in 3, 2, 1 (Score:2)
Not a problem automation can't solve.
Getty Images should play ball and come up with image provisioning that doesn't suck. Should.
But in my experience design companies are among the most conservative and dumbest when it comes to digital. The fuss and hassle that Font companies cause with their abysmally shitty licensing schemes cause people to move to FOSS fonts in droves. Just last year IBM moved from Helvetica to their own FOSS font design called Plex, giving the big font fondries a huge middle finger and
Just use Bing image search... (Score:2)
Seems to work fine.
Wouldn't it be better (Score:2)
To just get rid of Getty's shit from image search? That crap just clutters up the search results anyway.
Ridiculous! (Score:1)
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What about “Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries!”