Microsoft's Age-Old Image Library 'Clip Art' Is No More

hypnosec writes Microsoft has finally bid a goodbye to the age-old Clip Art image library found in its Office products as its usage has been declining over the years. Redmond replaced the Clip Art's online image library with Bing Image Search. This means that people searching for online images inside an Office app will now be directed to a gallery powered by Bing Images that will bring in results from around the web. Bing's copyright filter based on the Creative Commons licensing system will let users get royalty-free images which they can use, share, or modify for either personal or commercial use.

Comments

Remove != Improve

[s.petry]

You could already insert images into documents, so your statement is a fabrication. This removes an internal set of images which allowed you to insert images without an internet connection. This is not an improvement as you claim, because this simply removes a feature and does not add anything.

The library has been hidden from users for a while, so it's not a shock that people don't use it as often today. Having the product depend on their search engine seems like another anti-trust case waiting to happen.

Re:Remove != Improve

[quetwo]

MS Clipart wasn't internal, or stored on your local PC since Microsoft Office 2003. It's gone online to download the clipart. In 2003 -> 2010 it cached them locally so that if you downloaded it once, it was cached on your computer so you could re-use it without having to download it again.

What was nice about the Clipart was they were all vector-based images. Meaning they scaled nicely. All the images that come up using the Bing search are 300x400 or close -- which looks like crap if you try to use it. Sure, most of the images in the clipart library were pretty bad and way overused, but at least they were pixelated crap.

Re:Another feature replaced with tracking

[bickerdyke]

I'm concerned about the Bing filter not working (or people maliciously manipulating their pages into being displayed as CC when Bing searches it) and then being sued. With the current clipart library, I knew it came with a licencse to be used.