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Google To Kill Off 'View Image' Button In Search
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.
Don't display Getty media in your search results.
That'll learn 'em.
but then of course they'd cease to exist on the Internet. They want the best of both worlds, and thanks to our legal system's emphasis on property rights over fair use looks like they got it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Or just push them to search images with another search engine?
When I want to remove my pics from Google I just deny their referrers. /shrug Don't people use Bing for images, anyway? *wink*
Can't servers (at least Apache) be configured with mod_rewrite to prevent leeching of images?
...24 hours before a plugin comes up to get the functionality back.
What the hell I use both of these functions on a regular basis.
About 27,400,000 results (0.32 seconds)
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.
I wish Google would just block Getty images.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
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.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Stuff like this will slowly kill google. It will just get more and more restrictive and useless and people will move on.
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...
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
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 finger as a selection cursor).
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.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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.
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...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
What about “Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries!”
#DeleteFacebook
If you need an add-on to disable Javascript, I pity you.
#DeleteFacebook
Only user input needed is so it can transfer money from your bank account to copyright holders.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Getty Images has now earned the privilege of being added to Adblock, or a new equivalent plugin.
But you can still right click on the picture in the search results and select "open image in new tab", and it loads the original picture from the remote host. Heh.
That only gives you a Google-generated (and Google-hosted) thumbnail, not the original image, whether you do it on the main results list or the expanded details box after you click a result. That is not an acceptable workaround for any original image much above thumbnail size (i.e. almost all of those that someone is likely to search for).
It's My internet, bitches.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|js|css)$ - [F]
I use Hover Zoom+ to get immediate views of the images without clicking anything. https://github.com/extesy/hove... https://chrome.google.com/webs...
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.
No, it's meant to protect photographer's rights.
tineye.com, drag, drop.
I'll just use Yandex' image search.
Its results are far less censored anyway.
https://yandex.com/images/
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
To me, finding a getty image is a failed search. Block them as I have exactly zero interest in their over posed images of business people in cheap ill-fitting suits and dead eyes.
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 kid repeats "Information wants to be free" often enough is unrealistic.
I don't like going after people who try to rip the original content that my people spent time and money making. It's not why we do what we do. But equally, we're not going to sit back and let someone rip us off because they wish for a world where copyright didn't exist, and neither are all the other people whose mortgages depend on being paid for their work.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
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?
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 saving 10s of millions of dollars per year in licensing fees.
Well done IMHO. Getty is in a losing battle with this issue.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
(For now), Bing still has a 'view source image' option.
Seems to work fine.
I agree - I just lost a ton of respect for Google upon this news. This, if implemented, proves to me that they don't actually care about providing access to information as much as they do lining their wallets. Once implemented, I will start migrating away. Especially if AMP for gmail turns out to be the predictable mess it will be.
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 technology to accomplish their goal. Hell, they'll print out the page, scan it and crop the scanned image if they have to.
Or, you know, if you don't want people using your image, don't post it on the public Internet to be viewed by anyone. Give a thumbnail or a heavily edited / blurred version and make someone go through a paywall to see the full image.
Welcome to the 21st century, where just because you think you get to have absolute control over every possible usage of your copyrighted works, doesn't mean that you get to actually enforce said control, nor does it mean that enforcement is at all practical for you. If you gave consumers no other choice but to buy your content, they MIGHT acquiesce if you made it extremely affordable, but if you tried to charge the exorbitant fees I see floated around (hundreds of dollars per photo, if not thousands), people will either not use your content (and use the content of your competitors, who are cheaper and easier to access), or rebel against the platform and switch to something like desktop Linux to escape the jail.
The only reason iOS isn't dead is that it still provides some pretty solid alternatives to the DRM, vendor-locked ecosystem. You can still install VLC. You can still take screenshots. You can still save images from your browser and upload them to Google Drive.
The iron-fisted rule of law and the rule of imperious content creators who want to own each and every use of their works is the outdated model, not the model of free software and open content. When content hosts, search engines, etc. put up barriers to people using content the way they want to, the network naturally just routes around the damage. Won't be long before there's a Chrome and Firefox extension putting the "View Image" button right back into the Google Image Search.
It doesn't matter what you think; it's happening whether you want it or not, and too many people do it to hope to stop it, unless you imprison every man, woman and child with access to a computer or phone.
Sure, you might be able to elicit a settlement out of Google, but you're not exactly solving the problem. People are still going to use Getty images without permission. Why don't you learn from the way the Internet works, and do like everyone else does, and just route around the damage? Figure out a new way to monetize your content, instead of expecting the world to continue to pay you the same way they always have. The world has moved on. Time for you to do the same, or you'll have to find a new career.
P.S. -- What happened to democracy? When the vast majority of the people unthinkingly do some thing, it seems really backwards to have that thing be illegal. I'm not talking about 20 or 30%; I'm talking about basically everyone (except, perhaps, for people like you, who conscientiously object to the new way of doing things.) I guarantee you that over 95% of people with frequent access to a computer have committed technical "copyright violation" (according to the letter of the law) not once, not twice, but at least a dozen or so times in their lives, and that's even accounting for the many such uses that would be considered Fair Use.
Some things, like murder or car hijacking, won't ever become that popular because the crime is self-limiting; you have to physically take something away from one person to give to another. Nicking someone else's photo or music or video and using it in another context for personal use is literally harmless to the person who produced the ph
To just get rid of Getty's shit from image search? That crap just clutters up the search results anyway.
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 direct experience of actually doing this stuff into the conversation, the vast majority of our customers are honest, perhaps because we do in fact offer our content at a reasonable price that represents good value to them. The few who aren't cause highly disproportionate trouble, and not only does that very much hurt those of us creating the content and running the infrastructure, it also directly hurts our honest customers because we really do have significantly less time left over to make more for them to enjoy. And in case you didn't realise, those few dishonest ones are the people you're defending here.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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 use of the Internet to do that thing and go about your business having a nice day, just as we're free to ignore your shouting.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Approach and repeat ultimatum in an even firmer tone of voice. Add the words, "or else"
--- Mercutio was right.
It'll change nothing, just add a slight (and i do mean slight) bit of inconvenience...