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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.
Another feature that was previously offline that has now been replaced with an online only feature that will track you.
I have nothing inherently against online features but the fact that they /always/ go hand in hand with tracking causes me to be against.
If I remember correctly, the OOXML ISO standard that was rushed through some years back included specifications for a clipart library not entirely unlike the Microsoft Office one. I suppose this move means that Microsoft has give up on adhering to its wholly-owned ISO standard.
-- That grumpy BSD guy - http://bsdly.blogspot.com/
Microsoft ClipArt365, a subscription-based online product where you can the entirety of MS's ClipArt library anywhere in the world*. Never worry about not having the right piece of ClipArt at your fingertips; just use our quick ClipSearch** feature and you'll have the right art at your fingerprints in moments! Then simply insert the art into your Word(tm) document, Excel(tm) spreadsheet or Powerpoint(tm) presentation with a single-click!***. All this for $12/mo or $120/year!
* Internet connection required.
** Internet Explorer 12.1 or higher required
*** Requires Office365 or higher. Art cannot be inserted into other documents. Internet connection required to view document with clipart.
For reasons that escape me, my kids' teachers use clip art on everything. You get a flyer with 5 words on it and twice as many clip-art renderings of school buses and apples.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
How does that filter works? Do images have internal metadata about licensing? Or is "copyright filter" just another way of saying that searches will only occur on websites hosting Creative Commons photos and images?
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It's because kids don't need good graphic design.
Even worse IMO is that comic sans font my boss always puts on her PowerPoints. No easier way to look immature and idiotic than to use that.
How the hell will bing fibd vector graphics which clipart was and did windows also kill WMF format alobg or not?
"Clip art being replaced with Bing Images"
At first I like: YAY!
And then I was like: DOH!
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
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.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It's usage has been declining? That would imply someone actually used it to begin with!
For all the reasons outline here, unless MS is going to embed their own metadata into every image I use that promises the image is safe, and that if it isn't, MS will foot the bill. Even so, that won't help me if I print something and lose the original digital version with the metadata. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
And any company with a brain in theirl legal department will add an additional filter to filter out those. At least the advantage of the CC licences is that they are machine readable. (ok. "readable" is a bit misleading. Can be represented by a combination of machine readable flags)
But still, with the old clipart, you knew that the images belonged to the Offce package and you were fine to include them into documents generated with that office package. (same for Corel Draw. No one bought that for the actual software but rather the clipart library!)
You now have at least to think about licences. (Like checking for the "sharealike" flag that sums up the "viral" part of the CC)
No, for most people out there it's more like they WOULD HAVE to think about licences, but rather are enforced in their believe that what comes up in Bing (or Google) image search is public domain. Or else it wouldn't be on the interweb!
bickerdyke
And it's in Comic Sans, amirite?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
But what of curation?
/.'s spellcheck. There's a surprise.
If I do a web image search, I get 2,000,000,000,000,000 possible matches to wade through. With maybe 0.0001% of them being simplified line art or, heaven forfend, SVG.
Also, that random pile of images has no cohesive style.
wow, me break
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
You can actually choose to insert your own from your computer or use another search provider I think. I subscribe to Office 365 for Business and have used the clip art search exactly once, switching to using Google via Chrome after a few minutes of a fruitless search of the Bing results (plenty of good results, just didn't find what I wanted).
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Have you ever looked at Microsoft Office's clip-art? It also has no cohesive style, and is full of awkward goofy styles and oddly specific pictures that you can't imagine being appropriate for any document other than "how not to use clip-art".
> you're better off googling for it (not binging).
Why, other than anti-Microsoft bias? If Google doesn't also have this creative commons filter, Bing has become the superior product for clip art searches.
for repair technicians. Most of the virus cleanings I do come from people searching for images!
You can still get the classic Office experience back.
Click the up arrow in the right hand side of Ribbon, and it is hidden. Now go to the Quick Access toolbar at the left hand side of the titlebar and from its dropdown menu, choose "Show Below the Ribbon". Now you can add any commands that you want into this toolbar and it essentially gives you the same functionality that you had in previous versions of Word.
Have a nice day.
How long until the EU breaks up this blatant attempt at bundling?
What if you can spell museum but can't spell "never mind"? ;)
I'll open the ".DOC" file that they send via email and see :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Well, can't have everything.
Even worse IMO is that comic sans font my boss always puts on her PowerPoints
Would any of these be better?
You could always try unmaximizing the window. In Windows 7 or later, press Win+Right for one window and Win+Left for the other.
PCs aren't islands anymore
They are when they're laptops on a bus, train, or airplane, and your employer is unwilling to foot the bill for mobile Internet.
Or the email with the link to the page containing a list of URLs pointing at PDF files. Because it's easier to do all that than to read whatever is in the PDF file on a web page somewhere.
Still a misspelling. The cover of the album Nevermind isn't likely to be free for use as clip art.
How the hell will bing fibd vector graphics which clipart was
ext:svg, I presume.
We should make an email viewer that de-moronifies school emails. In all fairness to the teachers, the content delivery systems that they are stuck with are also very painful.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If Google doesn't also have this creative commons filter, Bing has become the superior product for clip art searches.
It does.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Joke's on them; I don't have Comic Sans installed.
Joke's on you, the font is embedded into the document.
No, I'm complaining about the ribbon, too, even though I've gotten used to it.
I (and almost everyone else) just want what *already existed*
It could be worse...the first grade newsletters that get sent home from my daughter's school are .pptx (seriously). I think I've only seen Comic Sans once or twice so far, though.
I'll open the ".DOC" file that they send via email and see :)
If you're lucky. If you're not, it's a ".PPT" file.
Dark Reflection
At work we'll get emails with attached powerpoint slide(~4MB) with around two lines of text for this or that event. They don't bother to put any information about the event in the body of the email so we don't have to fire up powerpoint to figure out what they're advertising.
I don't read AC A human right
> you're better off googling for it (not binging).
Why, other than anti-Microsoft bias? If Google doesn't also have this creative commons filter, Bing has become the superior product for clip art searches.
Why? Because I've found Google to provide better search results than Bing. That's why. Do you believe that the only reason people use Google instead of Bing is that they have an anti-Microsoft bias?
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.
Sorry... you can't safely vet for copyright using an automated tool.
What happens when someone mistakenly (or maliciously?) mislabels a copyright-protected work managed by a rights troll as CC0 or CCBY ?
Google can't select for public domain (or CC0) however. On the other hand, the Bing search seems to be pretty bad, missing images from Wikimedia Commons for example.
As someone with a very public anti-MS stance, I'll admit that I've had good results come back with Bing. If a GIS doesn't bring back what I'm looking for, Bing will. It's just their general web search that I can't get used to.
Also, Bing's video search is far ahead of Google's
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.